Sherwin Rio, "A COMPLETE CROSSING: FORT MASON PIER 2 HISTORIC RAILWAY & FOOTBRIDGE INTERSECTIONS" (detail), 2018; site-specific bamboo, rope, and wire installation, 4.5ft x 3.5ft x 27.5ft;
Sherwin Rio
California
Visual
Graduate Fellowships, 2019 - 2020
San Francisco Art Institute
↗ sherwinrio.com
Artist Statement
As an interdisciplinary artist, I use visual metaphors to materialize the historical, social, cultural, and cognitive oppositional forces that confront and affront human vulnerability. Through installation, performance, video, and sculpture I challenge viewing participants to reframe, refocus, and reposition “misvisibility”—the tactical misguiding of visibility leveraged by both the powerful and those seeking power, which can sometimes be ourselves.
While at Headlands
With its reliquaries of the past and important location at the mouth of the Bay, the Marin Headlands is full of possibilities for site-specific intervention and installation.
As a Graduate Fellow I will research, design, and execute a multi-part sculptural and performance-based project centered on the wreckage of the SS Rio de Janeiro that crashed off the coast of the Point Bonita Lighthouse on February 22nd 1901. This vessel, still underwater today, is fabled to have burned its own topmasts as fuel to get across the Pacific when coal ran out. It also once served to bring U.S. troops from San Francisco to Manila to fight in the Spanish-American War that resulted in the U.S. takeover and colonization of the Philippines. Coincidentally, “The Rio”—as it’s known—shares my surname and wrecked on the day of my birth, exactly 91 years earlier.
