Summer Project Space Exhibitions
Exhibitions by select Artists in Residence will be presented in Project Space each season. Visitors are invited in to witness and engage with the space throughout the exhibitions’ various stages of making: as working studios undergoing transformation, or in their final state as complete exhibitions. Project Space is free and open to the public Sunday–Thursday, 12–5PM.
Summer Project Space Exhibitions
Opening Reception: August 14, 3–5PM
(stay for dinner! Living Foods event starts at 5:30PM—learn more)
On View: Through August 26
Golden Green or Greening Gold: Fritzia Irízar
In Progress: July 10–August 14
By focusing on the relationship between gold mining and bird populations, Mexico City-based artist Fritzia Irízar’s (AIR ’16) work throws into relief the long-term and disastrous effects of the global mining industry. By literally re-shaping and poisoning the environment, gold mining has devastated, killed, and enacted a forced migration of massive numbers of bird species. While Irízar works in Project Space, visitors are asked to interact with her installation by plucking it into oblivion, and can also leave an imitation bird call on a recording. In later iterations of Golden Green or Greening Gold, visitors may bring in gold items to have them painted green, weighed, and cross-referenced to an equivalency table of environmental degradation per gold gram.
Survival Series: Constance Hockaday
In Progress: July 10–August 14
Inhabiting a space that was historically a dormitory for soldiers training and waiting to be shipped to the battlefields of WWI and II, Oakland-based artist Constance Hockaday will make a bed in which to imagine what laying in this room might have felt like while envisioning future battles, potential survival skill scenarios, and emergency strategies. In addition to conjuring these histories, Hockaday will also use her dream-space to meditate on contemporary Americans’ closely-held interpretations of survival, while exploring the physical, psycho/spiritual, and sometimes unintentionally comical methods many are developing to survive crises like climate change, natural disaster, invasion, economic collapse, war, and a violently growing societal divide along racial and class lines. Inspired in part by theatrics of survival in popular reality TV shows like “Doomsday Preppers” or “Naked and Afraid,” Hockaday will create a variety of survival kits recommended by doomsdayers, as well as her own kits that are built from research of interconnectedness between people and their landscapes. Ultimately, this project asks: how might we create a survival kit that truly helps doomsdayers confront the fears that motivate their extreme efforts to prepare for the end? and exposes how these fears may be only a shade more extreme than those we all harbor as a society with very little practice responding to disaster collectively and with compassion.
