500 Capp Street the David Ireland House – Page 11

State of Touching

Bells Howard
Wednesday, March 3, 5pm PST

State of Touching is a performance lecture by Bells Howard wherein sculptural pieces, objects, and drawings of The David Ireland House will be juxtaposed with a reading from their essay State of Touching Part 2: Shudder. This lecture will include various experimental visual and auditory elements. Following the lecture, Howard will be exploring the concepts featured in Gaston Bachelard Poetics Of Space in relation to various objects within The David Ireland House and the effect they have on the viewer’s body.

This spring, The David Ireland House at 500 Capp Street expands on the Bay Area Conceptual Art movement with Opening The Cabinet, a cross-disciplinary lecture series self-organized by our Artist Guides.

Bells Howard (They/Them) is from Portland, OR and currently resides in Oakland, CA. They are currently pursuing a BFA in painting from the California College of the Arts and have taken classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. Howard is an Artist Guide at The David Ireland House.

Image credit: Bells Howard, Untitled (2021). Graphite on paper.

On Space and Surroundings

William Moncayo
Wednesday, March 10, 5pm PST

William Moncayo will talk about artists that utilize space and surroundings in diverse ways including Ana Mendieta, Felipe Dulzaides, Bruce Nauman, and David Ireland. Following their presentation, Moncayo will facilitate a brief dialogue on how space and surroundings pertain to artistic practice, inspiration, installation, and process.

William Moncayo (He/They) is a visual artist and writer based in San Francisco, CA. Moncayo received a BA in Photography from San Francisco State University. Moncayo has worked for various art institutions and continues to do so as an Artist Guide at The David Ireland House.

Image credit: Felipe Dulzaides, It is my name (2009). Photo documentation.

Sittings

A solo exhibition by Bay Area artist David Wilson developed over 4 months in residency at The David Ireland House in 2021

May 1 – July 31, 2021

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David Wilson’s exhibition Sittings will share the results of the artist’s 4-month residency that began at The David Ireland House in February 2021. It includes a series of scored walks and drawing exercises, as well as public ephemeral installations that situate the House in the context of the neighborhood. A series of public programs featuring his research into the archives are planned as well.

The exhibition encompasses an installation of Wilson’s work within the Accordion Room, Lightwell, and Garage and features drawings and visual records of his daily durational walks, which act as scores of what he calls “episodic times of going and walking.” Other works included in the exhibition are small and large ‘scores’ in watercolor depicting the horizon from the roof of the House. These works act as durational recordings of his daily routine where pieces of the view are slowly patched together to form one brimming perspective of a horizon.

The House’s Garage will be activated with neighborhood public programs where the audience is invited to discover small artist-created offerings. Wilson will be transforming his walking scores into printed directions that can be picked up at the Garage for free and followed to a few outdoor “Sitting” sites in the neighborhood.

In the public installations around the neighborhood, David Wilson points us to three “Sitting” sites or immersive nooks. Wilson plans to leave an offering—copies of drawings and cassette recordings of musicians and poets—as well as a guest book in which visitors are invited to leave behind a trace of themselves. Within these public spaces, programmed engagements will highlight neighboring artistic producers within the “Sitting” site which includes performers, poets, and artists/neighbors.

Wilson imbues a generosity of his process by making space for others to be creative through his invitations of maps and imprints. Inspired by the works of David Ireland and Anna Halprin, he taps into the audience’s potential by allowing an individual to wander and discover freely within the parameters of open space. In creating a “score for walking,” he orchestrates a feeling that one has “arrived” at something, thinking about simple concepts (like a walk) – yet having taken away an onomatopoeia of an experience.

Dust and Bones

LUNCH HOUR at The David Ireland House

Featuring Curator Shehab Awad
Friday, May 14 at 12pm PDT
Online

Join us online this Friday, May 14 at noon for The David Ireland House’s first LUNCH HOUR. Curator Shehab Awad leads this free, midday workshop titled “Dust and Bones” using the House’s dining room as a case study to approach problematic representation through specificity, questioning, listening, honoring, and remembering.

Shehab Awad’s workshop will include research about essentialist, identity-based art criticism, personal discoveries, and a poem by the Haitian-born, queer icon Assotto Saint.

The workshop is one hour: starting with a presentation, which runs for approximately 40 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of questions and discussion.

How can we develop clear language constructions around complex histories within the gazes of art and museology? Should we bury the bones of the skeletons in our closet or hang them up for everyone to see?

Shehab Awad is an independent curator and writer from Cairo, Egypt currently based in New York City. He/she is Founding Director of Executive Care, an all-encompassing agency at the service of artists. Awad’s interests include artists’ books, cuteness, banality, hedonism, and the liberating potential of nightlife, sleep, recreational drugs, and chronic conditions. As a freelance curator, Awad’s projects highlight queer, marginalized, and undervalued practices. Recent projects include Happy tears (2020), a two-person exhibition presenting the sinister aspect of cuteness at 17Essex Gallery, NY through artworks by Ian Faden and Wayne Bruce Dean; A Body of Work (2019), a group exhibition exploring the body through textile at Jane Lombard Gallery, NY; Publishing Process (2018), a symposium about artists’ books and experimental publishing practices from the global south at Institute of Arab and Islamic Art, NY; Hiding in Plain Sight (2018), Syracuse University’s MFA graduate exhibition; and When the whites of the eyes are red (2017), a group exhibition about the conflation of sleep and death at Hessel Museum of Art; NY.

Publications include A Tardigrade’s Dream (2016), an illustrated, short story book about a batch of frozen tardigrades sent to outer space published by Nile Sunset Annex, EG; The Symbol That Must Not Be Named about the Raba’a Square Massacre in Branded Protest (X-SITE: 2020); The People Who Hold The Wall about laziness as a form of political resistance in Sara Enrico: The Jumpsuit Theme (NERO: 2021); and various writing in periodicals such as The Brooklyn Rail, ArtAsiaPacific, Art Papers, and Madamasr—Egypt’s leading independent news source. Awad has held curatorial positions at Townhouse, Cairo; Institute of Arab and Islamic Art, NY; and most recently, Participant Inc, NY. He/she holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. In Summer 2021, Awad looks forward to curating Bard’s MFA graduate exhibition and launching Executive Care with multidisciplinary artist Keioui Keijaun Thomas’ first long-form solo exhibition at Participant Inc, NY.

LUNCH HOUR at The David Ireland House is a program created to support the collective endeavor of the House’s staff to question their positions in the artistic field through creative and discursive means. LUNCH HOUR aims to strengthen The David Ireland House staff’s roles as art mediators in the ever-evolving landscape of creating narratives for art-making. The program invites curators, archivists, artists, and specialists for skill-generating workshops extended to the general public in the Bay Area and beyond.

Below the lighthouse is the darkest part of night

An exhibition of the work of New York-based artist duo Zakkubalan, featuring their 2017 collaboration with composer Ryuichi Sakamoto async – volume – and new work created in conversation with The David Ireland House

October 30 – February 19, 2022

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Working in the intersection of film and photography, New York-based artist duo Zakkubalan, Neo S. Sora and Albert Tholen, present a multimedia exhibition of new and older work at The David Ireland House at 500 Capp Street this fall. This is Zakkubalan’s first solo exhibition in the U.S.

Below the lighthouse is the darkest part of night features their 2017 collaboration with renowned composer Ryuichi Sakamoto entitled async – volume -, a 24-channel video installation that conjures an oblique, behind-the-scenes portrait of the composer and his creative process. Natural field audio captured in Sakamoto’s New York studio entwines with music from his 2017 solo album async to create an ever-shifting ambient soundscape. Twenty four small screens, each playing a looping video, are arranged in a darkened room like a photographic montage and create a womblike window into Sakamoto’s audiovisual environment. The piece collapses into a murky, abstracted space-time, allowing viewers to enter the composer’s subjectivity, where his everyday surroundings become indistinct from the music that they inspire. Below the lighthouse is the darkest part of night marks the first U.S. showing of async – volume –, which was on view as part of the Singapore Biennale 2019 and has been exhibited in South Korea, China and Japan.

The exhibition also features several new works created in response to The David Ireland House itself, which will be installed throughout the historic home. Zakkubalan takes inspiration for these pieces from Ireland’s long held fantasy that the House had been built by a sea captain. Bringing together film, sound, and sculpture, Zakkubalan shines a light on this cherished myth while preserving the fiction by drawing out it’s maritime metaphor. Abstract images of the ocean mingle with shifting light on the curved walls of the House. Sounds of an aging wooden ship mix with 500 Capp Street’s quiet creaks. A shimmering seascape is mapped to the carefully preserved imperfections and cracks in the plaster.

About Zakkubalan

Zakkubalan (est. 2016) is New York-based artist duo Neo Sora and Albert Tholen working in the intersection of film and photography. The pair graduated from Wesleyan University, and Tholen is a 2017 alumnus of Sony Picture Classics’ IFP Marcie Bloom Fellowship in Film. They have exhibited installation and video work at the 2019 Singapore Biennale, 2019 Dojima River Biennale, Watari-um Museum of Contemporary Art, and the 2017 Reborn-Art Festival, among others. Zakkubalan’s latest fiction short film The Chicken (2020), directed by Sora and produced by Tholen, premiered at the 2020 Locarno Film Festival and has gone on to play festivals around the world, including the New York Film Festival and the Hong Kong International Film Festival. It was written up in Variety and Cahiers Du Cinema, and Filmmaker Magazine named Sora one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

Book signing for Still Lives: In the Homes of Artists Great and Unsung by Leslie Williamson

**Book signing for Still Lives: In the Homes of Artists Great and Unsung by Leslie Williamson including a Q & A with the author and George McCalman**

Friday, November 5
Doors open at 6pm; Event starts at 6:30pm.

Reserve Free Tickets

Noted photographer Leslie Williamson’s latest book presents the homes and studios of a group of renowned artists from Barbara Hepworth and Isamu Noguchi to Joan Miró, and our own David Ireland at 500 Capp Street! Published by Rizzoli, the images capture how these artists lived and worked. The event is organized with Rizzoli Press and Williams Stour Architectural books.

Still Lives: In the Homes of Artists Great and Unsung (Rizzoli) by Leslie Williamson grew out of Williamson’s love of visiting artists’ homes and studios and witnessing the creative through line that invariably runs from their artwork to the spaces they inhabit and create in. She is especially interested in “soul spaces”, homes that still hold the essence of the artists even after they have departed. Spaces featured range from painter Jozef Peeters’ vibrantly-hued apartment in Antwerp to sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s home and gardens in St. Ives, England to the homes and studios of Joan Miró, Georgia O’Keefe and Isamu Noguchi among others. All the successful hallmarks of Williamson’s first three books are here: beautiful and distinctive photography; gorgeous interiors full of art and with unique details; and compelling and personal texts of each story by Williamson herself.

Leslie Williamson is a photographic artist best known for her unique and personal approach to photographing interiors, seeing homes as a portrait of the people who live there. She has the rare ability to see beyond the clutter of the everyday and into the soul of a space and in turn its inhabitants. A native Californian, she travels often, splitting her time between her own books and projects and commissioned shoots for design and editorial clients around the world: World of Interiors, Casa Brutus, T: the New York Times Style Magazine, StudioIlse, Commune Design, and De La Espada to name a few. She is the author and photographer of Handcrafted Modern (Rizzoli, 2010) and Modern Originals (Rizzoli, 2014) and the newly released Interior Portraits: At Home with Cultural Pioneers and Creative Mavericks, A California Design Pilgrimage (Rizzoli, 2018).