500 Capp Street the David Ireland House – Page 5

Film Screening and Curator Talk

Lawrence Rinder on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Thursday, November 17, 2016

Lawrence Rinder, Director and Chief Curator of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, has curated and written extensively about the work of Korean-American avant-garde artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who engaged with notions of identity and displacement. She created a small but mature body of work before her death in 1982. In this lecture, Rinder discusses her multi-disciplinary practice and screened some of the artist’s short films.

Artist Talk

Margaret Tedesco: Punctuation from the Archive
Thursday, December 15, 2016

How does an archive begin—is it an active decision to become a keeper of collective memory?

Since the 1980’s artist and curator Margaret Tedesco has been developing an extensive archive of ephemera, zines, books, works on paper and objects, with particular interest in poetry, performance and queer phenomenology.

Upon walking into Tedesco’s apartment in 1995 the late artist Ann Chamberlain simply panned the living room that contained her archive and said: “These stacks seem to be well-massaged.”

For her presentation, Punctuation from the Archive, Tedesco highlights a history of performance, as well as ephemera and objects from her collection and discussed her relationship to the archive as collaborator.

The best way to observe my archive: tripping down the rabbit hole, no focus, losing attention.

The archive plays itself.

The Punch Press is DRAG!

Thursday, December 29, 2016

A fantastic night that features:

VivvyAnne ForeverMORE, Vain Hein, Qween, Silk Worm, and Meredeath
Live show by the Bay Area’s most experimental Drag Queens with lip-syncs inspired by the work of David Ireland.
A “DUMB BALL” where the drag queens hit the David Ireland House-as-runway and werk, werk, werked it out!
Featured video work by Meredeath was on view in the Accordion Shop.
A special cocktail made by Veruca Bathsalts was so delicious that guests were “OKAYY GURRRRLLL-ing” while they listened to the gayest DJ set by Siobhan Aluvalot (GAYFACE) ever heard (voguing was encouraged).
We had free The Punch Press is DRAG! short-run edition posters, printed by COLPA press.

UNTITLED, SAN FRANCISCO, PIER 70

Booth A16, Pier 70
January 13 – 15, 2017

The 500 Capp Street Foundation participates in the UNTITLED, Art Fair in San Francisco featuring: The premiere of David Ireland’s Schemes (1988)

The 500 Capp Street Foundation is pleased to present, for the first time, Schemes, a series of nine works on paper by David Ireland. The original works on paper, a mixture of collaged photographs, graphite and paint, are from a series of proposed site-work schemes that Ireland created for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1988. In our UNTITLED booth, a commissioned series of all nine archival pigment artist proof prints was on display.

The Disagreeable Object

Virginia Overton
February 3 – April 29, 2017

View Gallery

The Disagreeable Object, takes its title from Alberto Giacometti’s surrealist sculpture, The Disagreeable Object, 1931. A defying sculptural attempt against artistic categorization, poised between movement and rest, between art and non-art, The Disagreeable Object is a rebellious and humorously unappealing object. Its vulgar shape is embodied in a form that may be disturbingly incomprehensible, but nevertheless sculpturally perfect.

During a lecture given at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987, David Ireland alluded to his own similar sculptural concerns, comparing his work with that of Giacometti’s sculpture and he asked, “How does one develop a form that evades categorization?” Ireland’s inquiry prompted him to further develop an artistic process that engaged with non-traditional materials and situated work in unusual artistic contexts.

“The exhibition,” as co-curator Diego Villalobos says, “hinges on alternative definitions of “good taste,” situating sculpture in the realm of attitude, beyond its material constraints.” Notes co-curator Bob Linder: “The exhibition uses Giacometti’s surrealist sculpture as a point of conversation between specific David Ireland artworks from The 500 Capp Street Foundation’s collection and features a quintessential Ireland sculpture, on loan from SFMOMA, A Decade Document, Withcomet, Andcomet, Andstool, 1980-1990.” The cabinet engages in a tongue-in-cheek way with Joseph Beuys’ ideas of social sculpture and the dematerialization of the art object. This and other artworks featured in The Disagreeable Object exhibition relate to objects we recognize or desire, but which have been abstracted both psychologically and formally; the works are humorous, strange, and meant to challenge our idea of traditional sculpture.

Organic Logic

Howard Fried, John Roloff, Mark Thompson
February 4 – March 18, 2017

Organic Logic: Howard Fried, John Roloff, Mark Thompson, the inaugural project in The Garage, takes its point of departure from John Roloff’s concept of “organic logic.” Roloff first arrived at the phrase preparing for a 1996 talk in Germany, encompassing the work of fellow Bay Area artists Howard Fried and Mark Thompson.

Roloff described organic logic as an intrinsic feature of certain Bay Area artistic practices in particular, an approach that “embraces complex, systemic, intuitive and process-oriented aesthetics and methodologies.” He further investigated this idea through guest co-editing, with critical theorist Mark Bartlett, the Fall/Winter 2000, “Organic Logic” issue of New Observations, a contemporary arts journal. From the base of Fried and Thompson’s artist sections, the expanded scope of the publication highlighted an array of local contributors across disciplines: visual and performing arts, earth sciences, and open source technology, foregrounding the role of artists’ research, writing, diagrammatic studies, and conversation.

Guest organized by Tanya Zimbardo, Organic Logic will feature key, but rarely seen pieces associated with the artists’ performance or event-based installations from the 1970s and 1980s including: Fried’s early public and private actions with multiple participants, Roloff’s outdoor site-generated kiln projects, and Thompson’s relational work with honeybees in the urban environment. Through their distinct approaches, Fried, Roloff and Thompson metaphorically address communication systems and investigated materials in relation to site.

Three evenings of Organic Logic artist-focused public programs such as talks will bring several of those contributors together – Amy Balkin, Sharon Daniel, Bernie Lubell, Jim Melchert, Stephanie Syjuco, Pamela Z, among others.