lcollins – Page 3 – 500 Capp Street

HOME(in)STEAD: A New site-specific dance performance by artists-in-residence, Megan Lowe and Johnny Huy Nguyen

Bay Area dancers Megan Lowe and Johnny Huy Nguyen investigate the meaning of home in a new, site-specific performance work developed during the duo’s 16-week residency at The David Ireland House. HOME(in)STEAD, an hour-long dance experience for intimate audiences of just 10 per performance, moves from front door to salon, utilizing the entirety of late conceptual artist David Ireland’s unique historic house turned work of art to explore themes of home and the intersection of dance, sculpture, and performance. The piece features original music by cellist Peekaboo and lighting by Rico Duenas.

June 24 & 25, 2022: 5pm & 8pm (SOLD OUT)

June 26, 2022: 4pm & 7pm (SOLD OUT)

NEW DATES ADDED

July 1 & 2, 2022: 5pm & 8pm (SOLD OUT)

July 3, 2022: 4pm & 7pm (SOLD OUT)

Tickets: $20-150
Available on a first-come, first serve basis. No one turned away from lack of funds.

The residency marks a developing collaboration for Lowe and Nguyen, who are building a dance together in co-collaboration for the first time. The two artists share a deep interest in immersive, sculptural, site-specific work, bringing their own strengths to the partnership—Lowe as a specialist in contact improvisation, aerial, and site-specific dance, and Nguyen with a multifaceted movement practice that includes breaking and other street dance forms.

Lowe and Nguyen were inspired by The David Ireland House’s residency open call in early 2022 to investigate and heal the concept of home together. “In our lived experiences, both of us have had complicated relationships with home. In interacting with the physicality of The David Ireland House through place-based movement interactions and contact partnering, we hoped to unlock new possibilities within the architecture to inspire embodied reflections on home and how we can define it for ourselves as an expansive space for healing, freedom, and connection,” they wrote.

Collaborative residency partner Minnesota Street Project will host a further performance program by the resident artists in summer 2022.

Lowe and Nguyen were selected from more than 60 applications. Jurors for the selection process included Aay Preston-Myint, Program Manager at Headlands Center for the Arts; Julie E. Phelps, Artistic & Executive Director of CounterPulse; and María Elena González, Sculpture and Ceramic Department Chair at the San Francisco Art Institute.

About the Artists

Megan Lowe is a fierce female dancer, choreographer, performer, singer-songwriter, filmmaker, teacher, and administrator of Chinese and Irish descent, creating dance art in the SF Bay Area on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory. With an affinity for dynamic places and partners, her creations through Megan Lowe Dances tackle unusual physical situations and invent compelling solutions, opening up the imagination to what is possible. Megan has performed with Flyaway Productions, Lenora Lee Dance, Dance Brigade, Scott Wells & Dancers, Lizz Roman & Dancers, Epiphany Productions, and more. She teaches for Joe Goode Performance Group, Bandaloop, Flyaway, for contact improvisation gatherings, and for her alma mater Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, where she currently works as the Office Manager. Megan’s artistic process thrives off of collaboration, prioritizing creating relationships of respect, generosity, and gratitude. This culture of magnanimity is infused in the dance classes Megan teaches all over the Bay Area, for organizations, schools, universities, and dance festivals, serving movers of all different ages, experience levels, body types, races, cultures, and socio-economic status—building community, connection, and understanding. meganlowedances.com

Johnny Huy Nguyen is a second generation Vietnamese American multidisciplinary somatic artist based in Yelamu (a.k.a San Francisco) and son of courageous refugees. Fluent in multiple movement modalities including myriad street dance styles, contemporary, modern, and martial arts, Nguyen weaves together dance, theater, spoken word, ritual, installation, and performance art to create immersive, time-based works that recognize the body’s power as a place of knowing, site of resistance, gateway to healing, and crucible of imagination. In addition to his work as an individual artist, he has appeared in the works of Lenora Lee Dance Company, KULARTS, Embodiment Project, the Global Street Dance Masquerade, and James Graham Dance Theater and has performed in the Bay Area, Oregon, Boston, and New York City. His individual work has been presented at the Asian Art Museum, the Chinese Historical Society of America, APATure, and SOMArts. His most recent full-length work, Minority Without A Model, premiered in 2021 as part of the 24th United States of Asian America Festival.

Peekaboo (they/them) is an experimental cellist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and youth educator situated on Ramaytush Ohlone land (SF). Their compositions are rooted in honoring the essence and spirit of past, present, and future Queer ancestors, prioritizing sonic exploration practices towards the decolonizination of Euro-centric structures embedded in youth and adult music education and performance. Through multiple collaborations with QTBIPOC2S Bay Area-based performers, they continue to work in togetherness, sonically activating bodily vibrations, readying the move towards non-binary Queer liberation, strengthening connections between Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Filipinx ancestry, and celebrating freedom of expression, rest, and breath.

Rico Duenas was born and raised in San Francisco. As a child, he spent time on the east coast with his grandfather, a sculptor and founding member of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In San Francisco, he also often accompanied his father to flea markets and garage sales, where his father bought, fixed, and re-sold furniture. It was there that he was introduced to artist Kevin Randolph, who was repurposing lights, and quickly developed a love of lighting and sculpture. He lives and works in San Francisco as a union electrician and artist.

HOME(in)STEAD is generously sponsored by John Sanger.

Image by Henrik Kam

Five Scores by David Ireland realized by Chris Brown and Johanna Poethig

Friday, July 29 and Saturday, July 30, 2022

Tickets are on a sliding scale basis starting at $20

No one turned away due to lack of funds, please contact alexe@500cappstreet.org

RESERVE TICKETS HERE

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Doors open at 6:30pm. Performance starts at 7pm. Duration 1 hr 15 min

Please join us for an experimental sound performance by Chris Brown and Johanna Poethig. They will be performing A Variation on 79, Side to Side Passes of a Dumbball, Dedicated to the Memory of John Cage (1912-1992).Their realization of the piece applies processes that Ireland used in creating his scores to activate the acoustics of the House using live sampling of sounds from the House mixed with electronic tones.

CHRIS BROWN, composer, pianist, and electronic musician, makes music with self-designed sonic systems that include acoustic and electroacoustic instruments, interactive software, computer networks, microtonal tunings, and improvisation. His compositions are designs for performances in which people bring to life musical structures embedded in scores, instruments, and machines. His music is available on New World, Tzadik, F’oc’sle, and ArtifactRecordings. From 1990-2018, he taught at Mills College in Oakland as Professor of Music and Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music. https://cbmuse.com

JOHANNA POETHIG is a visual, public artist and performance artist who creates public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture, and multimedia installations. She is a 2022 recipient of the California Arts Council Individual Artist Legacy Award. Her work plays between realism and abstract forms, architectural and intimate scales, historic and present day events, collaborative processes, and scientific research. She has exhibited internationally and has been commissioned to create public art projects throughout California and in Chicago, Milwaukee, Washington State, New York State, Cuba, and Tbilisi, Georgia. Poethig is a Professor Emeritus at CSU Monterey Bay Visual and Public Art Department. https://johannapoethig.com/

PROTO-DOMESTICS: Experimenting with the Everyday

Wednesday, August 3, 6-10pm

Doors open at 6pm / Talk at 7pm / Screening at 8pm (Film duration: 1h 31m)

*Limited quantity of tickets available

RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKETS

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PROTO-DOMESTICS, the Architectural Association’s summer Visiting School program sited in the San Francisco Bay Area, will activate the patio of The David Ireland House for an evening of talks and films about radical premises of domestic architecture and experimental living environments, curated by tutors Lingxiu Chong, Tim Ivison, and Julia Tcharfas. Guests are invited to occupy an installation prepared by the School during their residency at Salmon Creek Farm, consisting of furniture, objects, and audiovisual materials in the spirit of “experimental domesticity.” Participants will also explore the current exhibition House of Commons by Neeraj Bhatia (THE OPEN WORKSHOP) and Antje Steinmuller, and view works by David Ireland on display. Later in the evening, there will be a short talk by the School in conversation with Bhatia on architectural experiments in domesticity, 60s/70s counterculture and the back to the land movement, and a screening of the documentary We Live In Public by Ondi Timoner.

Image: Ritual Group Drawing at Sea Ranch: Experiments in Environment Workshop, July 8, 1968 (Lawrence Halprin Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

Project Zamin presents “Myth of Four”

Saturday August 27, 6pm to 9:30pm

Reserve Tickets Here

Project Zamin in collaboration with Clarion Alley Mural Projects will be presenting “Myth of Four” an artist dialog with Shaghayegh Cyrous, Azin Seraj, Sholeh Asgary, Narges Poursadeghi on the topic, “How Can We Create Our Own Resources.” This will be followed by a performance by Sholeh Asgary, and Mobina Nouri.

Myth of 4 reimagines and recreates our present and future. In this program, the artists redefine their imaginary worlds, inspired by the four elements, Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. The theme of Afsaneye 4/ Myth of 4 blossomed out of a series of conversations between the participating artists in the project. Project Zamin is an endeavor featuring SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) Artists, initiated by Iranian-American artist, Shaghayegh Cyrous.

The Way Things Also Are

Libby Black

September 10-October 8, 2022

Featuring works by Maryam Safanasab, AJ Serrano, and Nicole Shaffer

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Berkeley-based painter, drawer, and sculptural installation artist Libby Black mines the everyday for meaning, charting a path through personal history and a broader cultural context to explore the intersection of politics, feminism, LGBTQ+ identity, consumerism, and more.

For her solo exhibition at 500 Capp Street, The Way Things Also Are, Black takes inspiration from late conceptual artist David Ireland’s home, archive, art practice, and legacy to both reveal and propose unseen narratives within the House’s domestic spaces and collection. Black unearths the women in Ireland’s archive; offers her own queer/lesbian framework for the House; makes visible Ireland’s often overlooked, early figure drawings, never before exhibited; and creates space for three rising artists to respond to them. The exhibition title, The Way Things Also Are, is a nod to the catalog title, The Way Things Are, that accompanied the first retrospective of Ireland’s work in 2004 at the Oakland Museum of California.

Black shares with Ireland a deep interest in common domestic objects such as dishes, brooms, and chairs. Her sculptural works are to-scale recreations of these objects made of paper, pencil, hot glue, and acrylic paint. She places these in still-life arrangements, creating hybrids that mix the real and the imaginary. She also produces two-dimensional paintings and drawings based on imagery culled from disparate sources from her everyday life, as well as newspapers and books.

To highlight the artists’ common interest in everyday objects, at Black’s request, The David Ireland House is bringing back Ireland’s much loved Broom Collection with Boom, 1978/1988, which will be on loan from SFMOMA for the duration of Black’s exhibition and then beyond to the end of the year. The last time the work was exhibited in the House was for its public opening in 2016. Black is creating free-standing paper broom sculptures that will stand in formation in the front parlor room alongside the rare display of this Ireland work.

In the House’s bedrooms, Black uses the mattresses as landscapes to explore a queer framework, creating a new narrative in the space alongside and in correspondence with Ireland’s works. Paper buckets turned on their sides on the beds bring to mind orifices, intimacy, and the representation of two women in love while also referencing labor, women’s work, and stereotypes of gender roles in the household.

From Ireland’s collection of archived show announcements, catalogs, and magazines, Black has excavated those that pertain to women artists, bringing them out of the boxes to make them visible in the House through a series of paintings and drawings that incorporate the archived materials.

Black has also pulled from the collection several never-exhibited, early works by Ireland, a number of figure drawings that reveal a softer side to Ireland’s oeuvre, such as a pencil sketch of a shirt hanging on a hook. Black writes of it, “So lifeless, but yet so full of life. Trying to be nothing else but a shirt hanging, surrendering, and offering its folds for one to see all its vulnerability.”

Citing Ireland’s role as educator and her own, Black creates space for three rising, local artists from San Francisco State University—Maryam Safanasab, AJ Serrano, and Nicole Shaffer. For Black, the inclusion of their pieces “grounds us in the present with the threads of the rich history of 500 Capp Street.” She states further, “ I chose these three artists because each deals in their own way with issues of location and identity which was important to me. I have grown to know them and their art practices through my work at SF State, and have wanted to share space with them and support them.”

Libby Black has exhibited nationally and internationally, with such shows as California Love at Galerie Droste in Wuppertal, Germany; Bay Area Now 4 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art; and at numerous galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She received a BFA from Cleveland Institute of Art in 1999 and an MFA at the California College of the Arts in 2001. Black is an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University.

David Ireland’s Broom Collection with Boom, 1978/1988, is one of the most recognized assemblage and sculptural works by David Ireland. The work was a centerpiece at 500 Capp Street for nearly three decades before its acquisition by SFMOMA in 2007. It is composed of old salvaged brooms left behind by the House’s former owner, accordion maker Paul Greub. These are wired together into a ring and arranged in a clock formation. The brooms stand on their bristles and are arrayed from the least to most worn in a counterbalance, stabilized by a boom. Ireland considered this work a social sculpture because he felt that the brooms were a social instrument of Greub’s day to day existence.

The Way Things Also Are by Libby Black featuring works by Maryam Safanasab, AJ Serrano, and Nicole Shaffer is generously sponsored by Suzanne Hellmuth & Jock Reynolds, with additional support from Sam Tripodi & Matt Rolandson, and In-Kind support from Small Works.

500 Capp Street + Berkeley Arts Center Brunch

Sunday, September 18th, 10:30 am to 1pm

Tickets available on a sliding scale basis from $75-$200

Purchase Tickets Here!

Join 500 Capp Street and the Berkeley Art Center for a joint Brunch Fundraiser. Berkeley Art Center and 500 Capp Street are collaboratively strategizing joint practices of building support for Bay Area artists and artist communities. Get to know Bay Area artists who have been involved with both organizations, and meet other like-minded arts supporters and arts champions.

About Berkeley Art Center:

Berkeley Art Center is a hub for artistic exploration and community building that champions Bay Area artists and curators. Located in Live Oak Park in North Berkeley, we make contemporary art approachable at an intimate scale while serving diverse communities through exhibitions and artist-conceived events, workshops, and programs for youth. Since 1967, BAC has exhibited work by important local figures such as ROBERT BECHTLE, ENRIQUE CHAGOYA, BILL FONTANA, TARANEH HEMAMI, MILDRED HOWARD, HUNG LIU, JIM MELCHERT, CHIURA OBATA, SONYA RAPOPORT, KATHERINE SHERWOOD, PETER VOULKOS, and CARRIE MAE WEEMS, among many others. https://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/