Michael E. Smith

November 18, 2017 – February 3, 2018

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The 500 Capp Street Foundation is proud to present Michael E. Smith, opening November 18, 2017. Detroit-born Michael E. Smith is the first Visiting Artist, since opening to the public in 2016, that The 500 Capp Street Foundation has invited to fully engage with David Ireland’s largest and most famous work, The House, including the walls, floors, textures, windows, available light, as well as The House’s new additions, the terrace and The Garage.

Framing the exhibition, Michael E. Smith, are three David Ireland stage set paintings, Of Mice and men, The Twelfth Night, and Logical Form Study. All circa 1950-53, these early exercises were created during Ireland’s time at California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA). Notes Bob Linder, Head Curator, The 500 Capp Street Foundation, “The illustrations are not the quick gestured, monochromatic color fields we think about when traditionally referencing Ireland’s work. The stage set paintings are labored, graphic and naive, dramatic and psychedelic in their coloring. Strained, maybe even self-conscious, these predecessors to The House set the stage for Smith’s exhibition.”

Michael E. Smith, the exhibition, creates a dark, humorous, web–like narrative, spun amidst the entire David Ireland House at 500 Capp Street. Designed with a formal sparseness, there’s a theatricality to Smith’s installations in both his sculptures and his video work. Using only existing natural light sources—or sometimes none at all—Smith spends time reading the room/s, crafting relationships, and creating dialogues between objects and given spaces.

Bleakly arranged, Smith’s installations are as important as the works of art themselves. In keeping with Ireland’s practice, Smith’s economy caters to a desire to retain and expose the life span of objects. “Smith’s objects are brutal, honest, and deadpan in the best possible way,” Linder states. His material choices range from videos and sound works, to textiles, to compound objects—made with commonplace things, like tools, garbage, oatmeal, shells, telephone books, hats, sleeping bags, bees, taxidermied animals, a human skull and urethane foam. These (considered) materials are manipulated, re-contextualized, and tweaked enough that they begin to feel out of sync, at which point they’re used to create unexpected or alien environments within a given exhibition space. A viewer might encounter Smith’s work in the margins of the exhibition space: in the corners, on the ceiling, flat on the ground.

Artist Bio 

Michael E. Smith lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions that include: S.M.A.K., Ghent, Michael Benevento, Los Angeles; Joseloff Gallery, Hartford Art School, CT; KOW, Berlin, 2017; ZERO, Milan, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, Lumber Room, Portland, 2016; Kunstverein Hannover, De Appel, Amsterdam, Sculpture Center, New York, 2015; La Triennale di Milano, Milan, Power Station, Dallas, 2014; CAPC musee d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, 2013 and CAM / Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, 2011, among others. Smith participated in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and his work has additionally been included in group exhibitions at venues including MoMA PS1, New York, 2014; Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2014; and MOCA, Cleveland, 2013.

Michael E. Smith is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles; ZERO, Milan, and KOW, Berlin.

Michael E. Smith presents an evening with Barbara Buckner and Frank Wright

Thursday, December 21, 2017

The curtain opens with side A of the 1975 LP Solos Duets by Frank Wright, Bobby Few and Alan Silva. Frank Wright a key figure in the development of the Free Jazz movement had a uniquely expressionist saxophone style defined for being explosive, sensitive and most importantly, unpredictable. Wright collaborated, never producing a single record under his own name with a major label, remaining underground for most of his career.

As we flip the record, Michael E. Smith presents us with Hearts, Heads and Millennia three seminal video works produced in 1979-81 by Barbara Buckner. Buckner employed video and computer technologies to create painterly works of strong visual and symbolic resonance. Her formal explorations of the transformative properties of electronic image-processing technology result in metaphoric works of great pictorial sophistication. In her non-narrative, often silent compositions, Buckner’s dense and elusive imagery hovers between abstraction and figuration, resulting in startlingly mysterious manifestations of an otherworldly sensibility.

As the curtain closes we conclude with side B of Solos Duets. Michael E. Smith too remains behind the scenes, reflecting on the hallucinatory and silent compositions of David Ireland’s stage set drawings while himself remaining just out of reach.

School of Chairs

Forrest Bess, Jason Dodge, Rodney Graham, Jo Hanson, Los Jaichackers, K.r.m. Mooney, Feminist Land Art Retreat, and Anicka Yi
February 17 – June 9, 2018

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The 500 Capp Street Foundation is pleased to present, School of Chairs, the first group exhibition at The David Ireland House. The exhibition’s artists, through expanding and redefining their respective mediums, have by consequence reshaped how we think about social and gender politics, the environment, and the role institutions play in shaping art history.

We wrote this together, since each of us was several, there was already a crowd. Ours is a community reliant on one another, together as a mass, we craft and shape the narrative we call an exhibition. Our surroundings help dictate the direction, manage the message, and cultivate conversations regarding the arts, sciences, and social struggles. We make use of everything, ideas closest and those far away. We set up systems only to break them down, creating operations motivated by movement and space. We are forward thinking although grounded by our historic foundations. Turned upside down, we are both giver and taker, a structural contradiction built through contemporary discourse. Outspoken and cannibalistic, we move through the exhibition silently. We require maintenance; evade logical perception and demand believability. It is through generational lenses we visualize not just the tree, but also the roots of the exhibition. We create objects that embody a way of knowing, and a way of being in the world. Together we occupy space within 500 Capp Street; a home challenging domesticity; a museum testing what an exhibition can be.

It is here we kindly ask our viewer to consider the importance of their neighbor, listen to their story and breath.

Bob Linder + Diego Villalobos

Image: Gina; Courtesy of Feminist Land Art Retreat.

Artist Talk

K.R.M. Mooney
Thursday, March 1, 2018

Mooney’s work often inhabits a horizontal position, considering space and its inherited boundaries as an operative body. Their sculptural practice pursues abstraction and the agency of material bodies learned through the processes of jewelry and ornamentation. Using abstract forms that emerge through the interaction of various types of metals and their proximal materials, Mooney uses complex and intricate compositions to re-order our understanding of spatial and co-generative systems. Often positioned on the floor or in doorways, Mooney’s sculptures reorient how our bodies relate to these constructed forms, acknowledging the unseen and the polyvalent to consider issues of difference, embodiment and care.

K.r.m. Mooney was featured in the current group exhibition School of Chairs at The David Ireland House. Solo exhibitions include Carrier at Kunstverein Braunschweig, SECA Art Award Exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, En, Set at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, Oscine at Reserve Ames, Los Angeles, and Near Passerine at Pied-à-terre, Ottsville, Pennsylvania.

JOHN KENNEDY PERFORMS JOHN CAGE WITH THE SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE

Thursday, March 8, 2018

500 Capp Street was proud to host notorious conductor and composer, John Kennedy and the Santa Clara University New Music Ensemble. Kennedy’s performance at The David Ireland House pays homage to one of David Ireland’s greatest influences, John Cage. John Cage’s diverse and varied musical output filled the rooms of the David Ireland house with a site-specific musical event devised in the manner of a musical happening.

The one-evening only event featured the Santa Clara University New Music Ensemble led by Berkeley composer/conductor John Kennedy, who had a close association with Cage during Cage’s last years and who directed Cage’s memorial Musicircus in New York. Using Cage’s Variations as a template for constructing the happening, a wide selection of Cage’s works were simultaneously presented, including Living Room Music, Song Books, Eight Whiskus, Lecture on Nothing, and more.

Your Eye Would Glide Over the Grey

San Francisco Cinematheque at The David Ireland House
Thursday, April 19, 2018

“Your eye, first of all, would glide over the grey…” — George Perec

San Francisco Cinematheque presents Your Eye Would Glide Over the Grey, a series of film and video works that explore the secret lives of objects, the interplay of intimacy, identity and consciousness as modulated by constructed and deconstructed space, and conceptual contrasts between art and non-art objects.

The evening’s program opener The Toy Sun (2011) by Ken Kobland is a despairing ode to T.S. Eliot, Gordon Matta-Clark, Kobland’s old friends and the ravages of time. As a counterweight, cryptic fragmentary works by Julia Dogra-Brazell Mirror Without Likeness (2016) and Karissa Hahn In Nothing Flat and Reveries (2013) talk back and question notions of completion and the fixity of identity. Jean-Paul Kelly’s Movement in Squares (2013) contrasts the eloquent expressivity of painter Bridget Riley, with the devastation of 2011 home foreclosures, ruined lives and disgorged homes. Bettina Hoffmann’s choreographic Myopia (2011) foregrounds sounds in a strangely lush and attenuated interior, while Coral Short’s similarly dance-like between us presents a polymorphous fusion of flesh and furniture.

The final piece of the evening was Dana Berman Duff’s post-Warholian Catalogue Volume 10 (2017)—part of the artist’s ongoing post-Warholian examination of advertising and home decor—layers the cryptic text of Georges Perec’s Things: A Novel of the Sixties (1965) over a tragically submerged flock of Arne Jacobsen knock-offs, a drowning flock of schooling chairs.

Image: Dana Berman Duff, Catalogue Volume 10, 2017; Courtesy of the artist and San Francisco Cinematheque.