500 Capp Street the David Ireland House – Page 7

Box of Angels

Felix Gonzalez-Torres
May 12 – July 29, 2017

1991, David Ireland and Felix Gonzalez-Torres were featured in the group exhibition, The Savage Garden, at Fundacion ‘la Caixa’, Madrid, Spain. This exhibition, curated by Dan Cameron, explored ideas of landscape as metaphor, the grey area between abstraction and representation, and the desire to deny categorization in terms of artwork that belongs to a specific medium. Box of Angels, expands on the statuary artworks made by David Ireland from 1991 through 1997.

The title itself is taken from an Ireland sculpture, in which he filled a turn-of-the century museum vitrine with an overwhelming number of reproduction statuaries. “Although this particular artwork will not be on view during the exhibition, Ireland’s expansive vocabulary allowing traditional Western iconography to appear in his work will be the exhibition’s driving force,” notes exhibition curator, Diego Villalobos.

For Box of Angels, The 500 Capp Street Foundation curators, Bob Linder and Diego Villalobos, will recreate and expand upon two Ireland installations, Boulevard, (1993) and Angel, (1997). Traditionally seen as mediators between heaven and earth, Ireland used angels to represent thoughts of divine spirituality, tweaking their classical and romantic traditions while continuing to think about them as abstract forms. Linder and Villalobos will recreate Boulevard, (1993, Mattress Factory), a large-scale installation built with concrete lawn ornaments, within the Jensen Architects’ addition of The David Ireland House. For the original 1993 installation, David Ireland used 130 statues, mostly Venuses, a few statues of David, and some winged cherubs. The current installation will include 80 plus statues, sourced from A. Silvestri Co., the same statuary business Ireland used years ago. Recognized first as temple icons, then museum pieces, and eventually ubiquitous lawn ornaments, Ireland’s use of the statues in his Boulevard installation returned the lawn ornaments to the museum. Covering the staircase with ready-made garden figures, leaving just enough room on the side for visitors to maneuver the steps, Ireland placed such a large number of statuaries into the second floor room of the museum, that it became nearly inaccessible.

In addition to Boulevard, the Box of Angels exhibition features Ireland’s, Angel, (1997). For this work of art, Ireland temporarily deconstructed the grey fiberglass angel created for Angel-Go-Round (1996) and presented the figure horizontally on the wall for his ICA Maine College of Art exhibition. During this exhibition, Angel was given a second life, halted from her overhead rotation in Angel-Go-Round and strapped to the wall like a static David Ireland monochrome. The di Rosa Collection has generously agreed to de-install and loan the angel figurine to The 500 Capp Street Foundation for the Box of Angels exhibition, enabling it to be presented horizontally on the wall for only the second time in 20 years.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Box of Angels is honored to feature “Untitled” (Passport), (1991) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The 23 x 23 x 4 inch stack of blank white paper – a minimalist object embedded with a multiplicity of meaning – temporarily resides in Ireland’s guest bedroom.

In the absence of information and images, the empty pages leave the question of identity, accessibility, and materiality open-ended. “The blank pages, available for the taking, involve more than just audience participation, these works were critical of the difference between outdoor works of art and true public sculpture,” said Bob Linder, exhibition curator. “Untitled” (Passport) is graciously on loan from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Passport), 1991; Paper, endless supply; 4 in. at ideal height x 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 in; photo: Peter Muscato; © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation; Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Artist Talk

An Evening with Jibz Cameron
Thursday, May 25, 2017

Los Angeles based artist Jibz Cameron talks of her days in bygone San Francisco and her alter ego Dynasty Handbag.

Jibz Cameron is a performance and video artist living in Los Angeles. Her work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has been presented at international dives both great and small. She has been heralded by the New York Times as “the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years,” and “outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative,” by The New Yorker. She has produced numerous video works and 2 albums of original music. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag she has also been seen acting in work by various avant-garde theater groups and in many comedic web series that remain unpopular. She also works as a professor and lecturer of performance and comedy related subjects at Cal-Arts. Cameron recently moved from New York to Los Angeles and is in development with Electric Dynamite on a television series about a performance artist that moves from New York to Los Angeles.

Dynasty Handbag, photographed in Brooklyn, NY May 18, 2013. Image: Allison Michael Orenstein. Stylist: Emily Bess

AEROSOL

Bureau of Inverse Technology, Judy Chicago, Brian Moran, Charlemagne Palestine, Juliana Spahr, and Gili Tal
June 3 – July 15, 2017

The 500 Capp Street Foundation is proud to present AEROSOL, an exhibition in The Garage organized by Patricia L. Boyd, featuring Bureau of Inverse Technology, Judy Chicago, Brian Moran, Charlemagne Palestine, Juliana Spahr, and Gili Tal. In Boyd’s words, “Let’s take an aerosol to be something that can (even momentarily) hold the material and political ‘contents’ of space not usually visible to the naked eye.” The works in the exhibition use atmospheric states such as clouds and fog, and systems of governance such as cybernetics and surveillance, to consider the container that envelops us (air, the ‘nothing’ within which hard objects and bodies are positioned) as a medium through which forms of domination are exerted.

Images by:
Bureau of Inverse Technology, BIT Plane, 1999; Image courtesy of the Video Data Bank.
Judy Chicago, Campus White Atmosphere, Cal State Fullerton, CA, 1971; Image courtesy of Through the Flower Archive.
Charlemagne Palestine, Island Monologue, 1976; Image courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

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Curator Talk

Dan Cameron
Thursday, June 22, 2017

In 1991, Dan Cameron curated The Savage Garden, at the Fundacion ‘la Caixa, Madrid. The exhibition explored ideas of landscape as metaphor, the gray area between abstraction and representation, and the desire to deny categorization between artistic mediums. Amongst the several artists included in the exhibition were David Ireland and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, both of them featured together in Box of Angels, a past exhibition at The David Ireland House. For his talk at 500 Capp Street, Cameron expands on this exhibition and other projects that have informed his curatorial practice.

Earthly Bodies

A score by Brian Collentine, directed by Anna Halprin for The David Ireland House
Thursday, July 12, 2017

The 500 Capp Street Foundation proudly presents Earthly Bodies, a site-specific performance work scored by Brian Collentine, directed by Anna Halprin and performed by her movement lab. Based on the exhibition, Box of Angels, at The David Ireland House, the dance reflected on David Ireland’s statuary and iconic works, such as Boulevard, 1993 and Angel, 1997, both of them exhibited for the second time in over 20 years and for the first time at 500 Capp Street. The works demonstrate Ireland’s interests in ideas of conceptual and material frailty and echo in Collentine’s take on the works. The dance begins with the physicality of The House and its location on the corner of Capp and 20^th. The upper windows have a clear view of the streets below. The outside comes in. Ireland’s ‘angels’ are strewn helter skelter on the back deck and stairs. The intersection of the two create a relationship that become Earthly Bodies.

Brian Collentine has been studying, performing and working with Anna Halprin for 18 years. He is a graphic designer by profession and has a keen interest in the scoring process & the RSVP Cycles developed by Lawrence Halprin. His movement scores have been performed at YBCA and the Mission Cultural Center. He is a member of Anna Halprin’s Sea Ranch collective and has appeared in a number of her films. For over 50 years, Anna Halprin has been challenging conventional notions of dance. At the core of Halprin’s artistic philosophy is the need for art to reflect the everyday life. This has led her to pursue a new language through movement, resulting in iconic performances such as Parades and Changes (1965), Intensive Care: Reflections on Death and Dying (2000), and Spirit of Place (2009).

Workroom

Nayland Blake
July 29 – September 9, 2017

The 500 Capp Street Foundation is proud to present Workroom, a project by Nayland Blake, opening July 29, 2017 in The Garage at the David Ireland House.

Nayland Blake muddles public and private space. A stretched canvas with a cut-out hole becomes a temporary wall over the opened garage door as materials gathered in San Francisco and around his studio in New York make their way into the exhibition space. In Workroom, Blake approaches The Garage at the David Ireland House as a site for production. Where intuitive and spontaneous processes develop into complex and personal inquires into how we define, relate and occupy space.

Blake works in performance, video, sculpture, and drawing, to reconsider and complicate narratives of sexual and racial identity. His work has been described as disturbing, provocative, elusive, tormented, sinister, hysterical, brutal, and tender. Nayland Blake is no stranger to the Bay Area, living in San Francisco from the mid 80’s to 90’s he was involved in the LGBTQ scene in the SOMA district and an active participant in artist-run spaces such as New Langton Arts, Media, Kiki Gallery and established institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Berkeley Art Museum, The San Francisco Art Institute, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Nayland Blake (b. 1960) participated in the 1991 Whitney Biennial and the 1993 Venice Biennale. The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, presented a survey of his performance-based work in 2003, and his work was the subject of a 2008 survey exhibition at Location One, New York. Most recently, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco presented a one-man exhibition entitled Free/Love/Tool/Box! In 2012, Blake was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Blake chairs the International Photography Center-Bard MFA program and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York and Anglim Gilbert in San Francisco.