Author: 500 Capp Street the David Ireland House

The Emeryville Mudflats

Joey Enos 
Thursday May 17, 2018

Joey Enos discusses the iconic Emeryville Mudflats Sculptures that majestically appeared along Highway 80 from the 1960s until 1980s. The anonymous Emeryville Mudflat Sculptures began as an exercise in fine art pedagogy and bloomed into a self-governing public art for the people. It was chaotic folk art environment that gave the Bay Area a place of play and expression during the wave of cultural changes of the latter half of the 20th century.

Enos is an artist and historian who is a 5th generation East Bay Resident and resided in Emeryville for many years. His family has a long history in Emeryville and operated the Michel & Pelton Company off of Horton from 1929-1982. His great-grandmother was Earl Warren’s secretary when Emeryville was coined “The Rotten City.” Joey works as a Collections Manager for The National Pastime Museum. Follow Joey’s curated collection of Mudflat Art pics on Instagram @emeryville_mudflats

Image: San Francisco Bay Monster, 1978 (Courtesy of The California College of Art).

I hope all is well…

Tony Matelli
June 23 – October 13, 2018

View Gallery

The David Ireland House is pleased to present, I hope all is well…, Tony Matelli’s first solo exhibition in San Francisco.

I hope all is well…, presents a series of highly produced, representational artworks using materials such as bronze, marble, and silicone. The end result is anything but traditional sculpture. Matelli’s artworks are lifelike, seductive, and beautifully wrong. His hyper realistic sculptures are often mistaken for the actual thing, undermining the viewer’s expectations of what they could or should see in an art institution.

The artwork selected for the exhibition creates a complicated experience. The viewer becomes invested and absorbed in the work allowing the narrative to expand the object and address neglect, social class, art history, as well as transformation. Tic Tac Toe, for example, is a dusty looking mirror adorned with finger traces across the surface that has been painstakingly crafted in layers of tinted urethane. Window, is a darkly painted bronze sculpture cast from a cracked residential windowpane; both are designed to confuse reflection and subvert subjective clarity. These artworks share a relationship with David Ireland’s Copper Window, circa 1978, where Ireland replaced a broken windowpane in the front Parlor Room of 500 Capp Street with a copper etching plate. Beneath the window is a cassette recording of the artist describing in great detail the view outside the window before it was covered. These works challenge the romantic idea of the window as a portal or symbol of the picturesque creating an obstacle or monolith rather than an opportunity.

Matelli’s sculptures create a disconcerting tension between uneasiness and humor, frequently suspending time and belief. The polyurethaned walls of 500 Capp Street become an ideal framework for this exhibition, an uncanny environment, echoing the past while caught in a state of contemporary conversation. Matelli’s sculpture Josh is the embodiment of this idea, enlightened yet completely collapsed. Josh is frozen—a ghost, untethered and free, floating adrift within the institution, he is a vessel, a shell, the house itself—Josh, much like Glass of Water, is literally half empty, half full. A hyper realistic sculpture of what appears to be a standard cardboard box and a glass of water, a lens through which to see total neutrality, a three-dimensional trompe l’oeil asking us to take a critical look at ourselves and the culture around us, a moment where one’s not sure what is fiction or reality—it’s perfect.

Not the Apple but the Fall

Francis Alÿs, Fiona Connor, and Tony Labat
June 23 – August 11, 2018

The Garage at The David Ireland House presents, Not the Apple but the Fall an exhibition featuring Francis Alÿs, Fiona Connor, and Tony Labat.

Not the Apple but the Fall operates like a pause, a gap, a moment of suspended meaning where what is real and artificial bleed together into a matter of interpretation.

The work of Francis Alÿs finds reality in absurd or transgressive situations. In his video The Nightwatch, Alÿs released a fox into London’s National Portrait Gallery in the middle of the night. The museum’s CCTV system tracks the fox and documents it’s movements. The fox, a wild infiltrator, marginalized through modern urban expansion, is considered a pest in cities throughout Great Britain. Here the fox enacts the role of guardian, disrupter, foreigner, and local helping to fabricate a visual fable of the modern city.

Los Angeles based artist Fiona Connor presents two recent sculptures, Community Notice Board (Laundry) and (Cafe), these are exact reproductions of original message boards found around Los Angeles that represent varying types of ephemera. From business cards, photographs and torn flyers, to traces of glue, staples, and stains, each perfectly recreated, become a minimally self-composed collage of vanishing communal forums. Both literal and abstract, Connor creates a model that performs the role of a hyperrealist painting as well as a generalized document, shifting how we think about time and frameworks that support it.

Tony Labat obstructs the gallery’s entrance with House Accessory (The Freezer), a transparent industrial curtain used for environmental separation in walk-in freezers as well as a barrier in warehouses, offering privacy as well as preventing noise control. Labat’s sculpture is the perfect alternative to a permanent wall, offering openness and accountability. Labat will also include two new works on paper featuring isolated imagery, a disquieting slippage between the body and space. While House Accessory, deals with an exterior dialogue, the drawings focus internally, rendering the personal as a distant reflection of itself.

Artist Talk

Tony Matelli
Wednesday June 27, 2018

New York based artist Tony Matelli discusses his work and practice at 500 Capp Street.

Tony Matelli creates highly produced, representational artworks using materials such as bronze, marble, and silicone. The end result is anything but traditional sculpture. Matelli’s artworks are lifelike, seductive, and beautifully wrong. His hyper realistic sculptures are often mistaken for the actual thing, undermining the viewer’s expectations of what they could or should see in an art institution.  The David Ireland House presents, I hope all is well… Tony Matelli’s first solo exhibition in San Francisco.

Image: courtesy of Tony Matelli

Garden District: An evening of Grand Gugnol from the San Francisco Poets Theater

Kevin Killian
Thursday, July 19, 2018

The 500 Capp Street Foundation is proud to present two plays, The Pre Poetic and The Lenticular, by San Francisco poet and playwright, Kevin Killian.

In The Pre-Poetic, set in Berkeley, a young artist undergoes a séance with his psychic sister in order to approach the layer of consciousness that precedes the poetic.  In The Lenticular, a pair of Toronto sisters open up their fabled apartment to show a new room completely made of lenticulars to dazzle their friends.

Each play ends in a scream.

The Pre Poetic: with Lindsey White, Laurie Reid, Craig Goodman, Randall Mann, and Tanya Hollis.

The Lenticular: Lisa Wenzel, Will Nichols, Cliff Hengst, May Wilson, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Margaret Tedesco, and Scott Hewicker.

Kevin Killian is a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, art writer and playwright, whose recent books include Tony Greene Era (poems, from Wonder Books) and Les éléments (poems in French and English, from La Joca Seria). Forthcoming in November: Fascination: Memoirs (Semiotexte), Stage Fright: Plays from the San Francisco Poets Theater (ten plays, from Kenning Editions), and a show of Killian’s photos and drawings, organized by John Neff, at Chicago’s Iceberg Projects.

Be kind to the night

Cerith Wyn Evans, Laura Figa, and Stephen Lichty
September 1 – October 13, 2018

…an eclipse is an astronomical dance, slowly moving, one body sliding between another creating a momentary blackout. It is within this shadow the objects in Be kind to the night transform, shift character, and become animated.

Suspended between the perceptual and the physical, Cerith Wyn Evans’ negative neon, Eclipse, (2005) communicates both the language and environmental act. By voiding the illumination with black pigment the work becomes both legible and inaccessible, creating a double role as a vehicle of meaning and communication.

On the margins, Laura Figa’s Rest Index, (2018) poses as an animated hybrid that can be confused as an architectural feature or a living organism. The work, an altered violin shoulder rest, with patterned indentations added by the artist, implies a form of coded language. Extending from the body onto the architectural surface, a dialogue is created and information becomes abstracted.

Stephen Lichty’s discrete gestures preserve forms that were already there. Branch, (2018) is a large ornamental cutoff from a weeping mulberry tree. Lichty has debarked, treated, and conserved the uniquely twisted branches, causing the organic limbs to become statuesque. Like a phantom limb, Branch reveals itself as a newly discovered memory.

The Garage at The David Ireland House is a flexible exhibition space, included on general tours as well as free and open to the public every Saturday from 12 – 5 pm.