(Photo by Andy Vogt)

Last weekend I made a performance as part of a very unique opportunity presented by Amir Mortazavi of Highlight Gallery and David Kasprzak. Over the course of December and January ten artists have been making installations within a house in San Francisco’s Marina District, 3020 Laguna Street, using only materials found within the house.

I saw this as a chance to make a project I had imagined several years ago, one that required such an odd set of circumstances as were available in the drive-in garage in 3020 Laguna.

The idea was to float an effigy of myself above a dark pool. I would lay under the replica so that the image reflected in the water would line up with my own refracted image below the water. Then I would set it on fire.

The building process was unbelievably complex. I layered rice paper over my skin and adhered it in place, then split the shell open and reconstructed it. The level of detail was exquisite, with small creases and folds, fingernails and toenails. Ingrid helped me through long hours and around curves that I couldn’t possibly reach. The finished body looked like a giant cicada shell.

The flooding presented many challenges of its own. Several weeks were spent preparing the sunken floor to hold several tons of water. I waited until the day before the performance to fill it. The supporting wall held, and when night fell the darkened, flooded pool created a perfect mirror of the ceiling above.

There were many fortunate events and generous friends that made this performance possible, including an Emergency Grant from the Foundation For Contemporary Art in New York to capture this work on 16mm film. On my film team were John Rory Fraser and Christian Gainsley, who spent hours crafting an exquisite lighting set-up, and Ryan Malloy, who recorded sound. But even through all our trials, tests, and lighting experiments, we never set up all the elements at the same time. That would be saved for the performance itself, an unpredictable moment where I would discover if my vision was even possible.

(Photo Elisabeth Kohnke)

When I laid below the object of my intense labor, I was surprised to find how well it lined up with me, from nose to toe. There was no way to know that in that moment, the audience was seeing the same relationship, only with a third version of me, reflected on the surface of the water. The water was unshakably cold. For a few seconds I experienced my body rebelling against me, refusing to go under. My lungs refused to exhale the air that was keeping part of me above. In spite of that, I went ahead and lit the match and held it between my own eyes and the eyes of my double. I could see the flame flicker with my breath. Then I lit it on fire.

(Photo John Rory Fraser)

It wasn’t until the burning head began to collapse, until that second when I saw it falling toward me, that my body allowed me to do what I had intended. There under the water I opened my eyes and could see the yellow flames bouncing off the ceiling. I waited for them to die down before emerging again. Never before have I felt so strongly the sense of passing into another state of being and back again.

When I got up to leave, it was as though I was drunk. I could not keep a straight orientation. The memory of where I was seemed a distant place. Everyone was quiet as I walked unsteadily out of the basement.

It was something from a dream.

Dreamburn
Performance, 10 minutes
(more images)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

3020 Laguna Street In Exitum

Opening Reception: January 28, 2012, 3-7pm
Performance by Jeremiah Barber at 6:30pm*

Gallery Hours: Feb 11th 2-7pm
Feb. 15th from 3-7pm
Feb. 18 2-7pm
Feb 25 2-7pm – closing event

Curated by Amir Mortazavi and David Kasprzak

“Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.”   -Roland Barthes

Amir Mortazavi and David Kasprzak are pleased to present the opening of Highlight Gallery’s first project space, 3020 Laguna Street, a collection of site-specific installations created in a residence in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow District. Featuring a set of works formed solely from the materials of a residence sharing the same address as the title, the exhibition takes its inspiration from the works of artist Gordan Matta Clark. Matta Clark’s investigations into unused or forgotten residential spaces—calling them “nonsites,” a term he adopted from his mentor Robert Smithson. These liminal spaces included alleyways, median strips, and small portions of commercial and residential architecture. Matta Clark purchased these sites to become the medium of many of his works and as exhibition spaces for projects from his peers.

Working in this tradition, artists Jeremiah Barber, Randy Colosky, Chris Fraser, Christine M. Peterson, Yulia Pinkusevich, Jonathan Runcio, Jesse Schlesinger, Gareth Spor, and Andy Vogt were invited to inhabit a modest residential space built in the 1800s. This site has been home to a number of residents over the last 150 years—fulfilling the dualistic role as both a practical shelter and a symbol of dreams and ideologies, as written about by Roland Barthes. Now slated for demolition due to structural instability, the artists were invited to enter the space, to set entropy in motion with perhaps a more sensitive hand and a “tool belt conceptualism.”

The artists have responded to this specific history of the building through many forms, excavating the literal scars contained within its walls, investigating the history of the site’s residents and the craftsmen who create residential structures, projecting their own histories and identities into the space, and enacting these investigations through the purely cathartic act of destruction. Please join us on Saturday, January 28^th, for the opening of the exhibition—or perhaps more accurately, the wake of this site.

The house will be open to the public on several days in February, with a closing reception on Saturday, February 25 from 2-7pm.

“3020 Laguna: In Exitum” is the first off-site project by Highlight Gallery, San Francisco.

*Jeremiah Barber’s Dreamburn is partially funded by an Emergency Grant awarded from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York.

DOWN, a three-person performance art show featuring Bay Area artists Jennifer Locke, Jeremiah Barber, and Michael Namkung will take up the steep hallway ramps at Incline Gallery (long ago used to transport bodies to an embalming station for an adjacent mortuary). This unique one-time performance will take place on November 4th with artifacts from the performances on view through December 3rd.

Drawing on the language of sports training, athletic performance, and the sensory experiences of drawing under physical strain—often until to the point of failure, Michael Namkung presents an endurance piece for DOWN. Namkung’s Drawing Gym Performance Group will inchworm up and down the cycle of ramps holding chalk in their hands in order to make a drawing of this extraordinary exertion.

Jeremiah Barber relies on his continuous preoccupation with solitude, toil, and transcendence for his newest project, a self-portrait via other people’s dreams. Family members’ oddly distorted and half-remembered glimpses of the artist during their dreams are translated into real objects, to be destroyed during the performance. The materials left behind from the destruction, video, and photographs will document the piece.

For DOWN Jennifer Locke will make use of the steep halls and her history of interacting with fluid materials. Drawing from her experiences as a dominatrix, champion submission wrestler, and artists’ model, Locke’s performances involve physically intense actions in relation to the camera and specific architecture and employ material barriers, live audio and video feeds, and mini-cameras.

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ABOUT:

Michael Namkung holds a BA and a MEd from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from San Francisco State University. He has performed and exhibited in venues such as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, the LAB, Root Division, Kearny Street Workshop, the Richmond Art Center, the POW! Performance Art Festival. He is a recent recipient of an Individual Artist Commission Cultural Equity Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, and an Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation. Michael lives and works in San Francisco.

Jeremiah Barber is a visual artist based in San Francisco, California. He completed an MFA in Art Practice at Stanford University and a BFA at Columbia College, Chicago. A former member of Marina Abramovic’s Independent Performance Group, his work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, and The LAB. The son of a priest, Barber writes for KQED, teaches media classes at Stanford University, and recently returned from a summer residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

Jennifer Locke has exhibited in venues such as the 48th Venice Biennale; Air de Paris, Paris; the 9th Havana Biennial; the Basel Art Fair, Kunsthalle, Basel; La Panaderia, Mexico City; Palais de Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Canada, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art; and the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley. She has curated for Artists’ Television Access and Queens Nails Annex, co-produced a cable access show, and sung in punk bands. Locke teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. She lives and works in San Francisco, and was recently awarded a 2012 Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship.

Through the unique collaborative relationship between San Francisco’s Paxton Gate and the San Pancho Art Collective, an unusual series of ramps and volumes is transformed into the Incline Gallery, a new San Francisco contemporary art space. Incline Gallery seeks to offer a nurturing platform and a solid support system for emerging Bay Area visual and performative artists.

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For more information, please contact Brian Perrin (brian@inclinegallerysf.com) or visit www.inclinegallerysf.com.
INCLINE GALLERY
766 Valencia St. (at 19th), San Francisco
Sat & Sun 12pm-6pm
Free and open to the public

Ingrid modelling the Cheetah mask, 2008

When the opportunity arose to show Sustained by Visions again, with three and a half years having past since making it, I knew there would be things I would want to change (you can see some excerpts of the new edits here). I promised myself that I would excercise restraint, make minor cuts and merely tighten up the duration of the videos, but as soon as I began it was clear that it was going to be a new work altogether.

Deer Designs, pen on paper, 2007

There were reasons to rework the videos–they were first edited in a flurry of a month and in the interim I’ve expanded my editing tools to accomplish some of the effects I had originally envisioned. But I also feared what would happen as I delved into material that is now distant from me. Would I be able to respect the decisions I made as a younger artist?

Porcupine Mask, pencil on paper, 2007

Fortunately the process was easier than I imagined it would be. It was so enjoyable to see friends from Chicago performing again, and to search through the lengthy footage for small moments that display their character. And with a better grasp on sound and image, the result of the changes was more like a reckoning to the vision of this project that came to me before any of it was made.

I told Ingrid about my fears of having changed too much as an artist to be able to work on an old project. She gave me a sidelong glance, “You may have changed, but we’re always doing the same things.”

Kafka Diaries: One (video still), 2011.

This summer I’ve planned a series of videos based on the journal and travel writing of Franz Kafka. You can see the first video here.

I became infatuated with Franz Kafka’s more outlandish writing in 2006. Aside from his novels, there are many incredible moments and brilliant story starts to be found in his letters to his one-time fianceé Felice as well as his diaries.

What interested me most as an artist was the obtuse manner in which Kafka related to the world around him. Here is an entry from 1911 just after he was hired at the insurance agency:

“While dictating a rather long report to the district Chief of Police, towards the end, where a climax was intended I got stuck and could do nothing but look at the typist, who in her usual way, became especially lively, moved her chair about, coughed, tapped on the table, and so called the attention of the whole room to my misfortune. The sought-for idea now has the additional value that it will make her be quiet, and the more valuable it becomes the more difficult it becomes to find it. Finally I have the word, ‘stigmatize,’ and the appropriate sentence, but still hold it in my mouth with disgust and a sense of shame as though it were raw meat, cut out of me…”

I love these minute moments that he stretches out to something terrifying. For me it is all the more potent when he addresses his fears through metaphor. The Bridge, The Bucket Rider, and The Hunger Artist are all great stories for this, but my all time favorite is The Helmsman. The first time I read it I carried the book around with me for days, reading it to all my friends:

“‘Am I not the helmsman here?’ I called out. ‘You?’ asked a tall, dark man and passed his hands over his eyes as though to banish a dream. I had been standing at the helm in the dark night, a feeble lantern burning over my head, and now this man had come and tried to push me aside. And as I would not yield, he put his foot on my chest and slowly crushed me while I still clung to the hub of the helm, wrenching it around in falling.”

Later the narrator gathers his shipmates, asking one more time “Am I the helmsman?” While the shipmates agree, they do not care about it enough to defend the narrator, and simply go back to bed.

The relationship of humor and irony to cruelty is something I would like to explore in making work about Kafka. While it is my first time working with historical material, I’ve found it to be surprisingly freeing, as many old ideas about performance are freed by taking on a character.

Finally there is something significant here about animation. In preparation I watched all the video and film about Kafka I could get my hands on, including narrative works based on his stories. I found the animation to be the only thing that really captured the spirit of his voice, and while I’m still learning all the reasons why, it has played an important role in figuring out what these videos will be about.

Here are two of my favorite Kafka animations. Enjoy:

“Franz Kafka” by Piotr Dumala

“The Hunger Artist” by Tom Gibbons

Ingrid Rojas Contreras as a Great Horned Owl (video still), 2008

In my first Root Division exhibition, I will exhibit the video series “Sustained by Visions”, seven videos in which friends and acquaintances enact their vision of their spirit animal. I’m very excited because it’s given me a chance to return to this series, which hasn’t been seen since it was first exhibited in 2007 at the Chicago Cultural Center. I’ve recut the videos, and they feel closer to my original vision of what they might become.

“A LIVE ANIMAL”
OPENING RECEPTION: July 9, 2011, 7-10pm
EXHIBITION DATES: July 7 – 30, 2011
GALLERY HOURS: Wednesdays – Saturdays, 2-6 pm (or by appointment)

The show is curated by Selene Foster and Christopher Reiger, and features:

Brandon Ballengee, Jeremiah Barber, Joianne Bittle, Bethany Carlson, Karl Cronin, Donald Farnsworth, Todd Forsgren, Dana Harel, Nicole Jean Hill, Michael Kerbow, Anne Klint, Maria Lux, Jon Rappleye, Shelley Reed, Steven Rubin, Susan Silas, Deborah Simon, Sarah A. Smith, Kate Stirr, Youngsuk Suh, Ryan Thompson, James Wendell, Gail Wight, and work from the Endangered Species Print Project.

In addition to the exhibition and Saturday night reception, there is an evening of presentations and performances next door scheduled. It should be a grand event.

AN EVENING OF PRESENTATION AND PERFORMANCE @ ODC THEATER: July 19, 7:30-9:30pm, 2011

Presentations:

• Chris Black, choreographer: “Extinction Burst (last dance, last chance): A reanimation of lost movement”
  Karl Cronin, artist: “Kinetic Empathy”
  Jeremiah Jenkins, artist: “The Hunt”
  Georgeann O’Brien, Ph.D.: “Direct observation of sensory neuron regeneration in live zebrafish”
  Brian Null, Ph.D., “Examination of Animals, Examination of Self”
  Christopher Reiger: “Introducing the Endangered Spcies Print Project”
  Jon Sack, Ph.D., Researcher, UC Davis College of Biological Sciences: “Bioelectric Venom”
  Gail Wight, Professor and Director of Graduate Art Studies, Stanford University, artist: “Animal Animosity”
  Philip Ross, artist: “Eating Bugs for Fun and For Profit”

For more information, please visit: http://www.rootdivision.org/events.html

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