Author: lcollins

Michael Zheng

A Tree is a Tree

October 22 – November 19, 2022

Opening Day: Saturday, October 22, 12-5pm

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San Francisco-based conceptual artist Michael Zheng’s work is influenced strongly by his Buddhist upbringing. Born in China, Zheng’s mother found him a Buddhist master when he was little, and his artwork is an extension of his ongoing exploration of the intrinsic nature of all things. He often uses the spatial, historical, and other contextual characteristics of a site or situation as the formal materials to create his work. 

The exhibition title, A Tree Is A Tree, is a Buddhist aphorism that informs the works on view, all of which place emphasis on ‘seeing’ and ‘noticing.’ Zheng observes details within the architecture, history, and personal stories embedded in Ireland’s House as a means of pointing to the transcendent moments inherent in daily life.

Planned works include the conversion of the living room into an enormous camera obscura. The immersive installation, entitled As Is, references the upstairs window Ireland blocked with copper and his accompanying audio recording that describes what can be seen outside. Similarly, As Is brings the outside in, but in such a way as to subtly critique how framing affects perception. “Life as it is, when framed in a particular way, can intrigue, can be art,” writes Zheng.

Zheng also contributes Wu Wei Drawing, a large-scale work on paper created by tracing nail holes, smudges, and cracks on the House’s wall and then repeating these over and over. For Zheng, this time intensive process is informed by meditation practice—a process of paying attention to the task at hand and accepting accidents as they occur. “By relinquishing the subjective expectation of the resulting image and instead letting the process dictate the act of drawing, this paradoxically often produces mesmerizing images in the end,” he writes.

A Root is No Branch is a large installation of photographic panels that present fragmented views of roots and branches, hung in such a way as to allow the viewer, through their own experience, to question their perceptive process. “Our acquired knowledge makes us ‘presume’ many things, including perhaps that the roots are lower in the soil than the branches in the air,” writes Zheng. “In reality, it’s not necessarily so. A tree is a tree, regardless of how we perceive it.”

Several other works in various media are planned and will be installed throughout the House. An accompanying full-colored catalog will be published for the exhibition.

Michael Zheng’s work has been exhibited internationally including in the Vancouver Biennale, the Baltic Triennial at ICA/London, OSTEN Biennial of Drawing Skopje/National Gallery of N. Macedonia, and Macao Museum of Art/China, and nationally at the Berkeley Art Museum, Contemporary Jewish Museum, de Young Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Marina Abramovic Institute West, and in the Portland Museum of Art Biennial.

Sherwin Rio

As Above So Below

December 3, 2022 – April 29, 2023

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Sherwin Rio is an interdisciplinary artist working in San Francisco who makes site-specific and research-based work in sculpture, installation, video, performance, and audio. For his exhibition at 500 Capp Street, Rio is inspired by Ireland’s affinity for enclosure, particularly his deep interest in the House’s basement, a space Ireland called “The Grotto” where he sourced dirt for his work and spent many hours in solitude.

Framed by Ireland’s dual relationship to architecture above and below, Rio is creating works that provide alternative, inverse ways of experiencing a house—indebted to the past, the unseen, and the underground.

In one work, Rio opens up the floorboards to reveal a hidden stairwell and extends it, with copper pipes. Rio also finds inspiration in Ireland’s basement, in the network of pipes and electrical conduit, and merges this with an artwork that Ireland made by recording the sound of the pipes and walls. Rio’s sculptural sound installation transmits and amplifies vibrational sound within the House– “I see these items–webs of ABS, PVC, unistrut, wood, soil and conduit–as the veins that bring lifeblood to the house, preserving its ability to function–a need that preceded Ireland and continues into the future,” writes Rio.

Rio also creates an installation changing the objects and airing out the Dining Room—filled with problematic objects, photographs, and animal trophies from safari travels—Rio clears the Dining Room and opens all the drawers, clearing and re-circulating air as a gestural symbol. Rio writes, “The work is a critical look at the commodification of nature and culture, dominance and violence as leisure, and a business that profited from and upheld ideas born of settler-colonialism, manifest destiny, and global capitalism.”

Additional installation works will be presented throughout the House as well. Rio will live at 500 Capp Street for 10 days in order to develop work for the exhibition.

(Photo by Henrik Kam, 2023)

Sherwin Rio is an interdisciplinary artist who makes visual metaphors addressing colonization, historical public amnesia, and intergenerational storytelling through a Filipinx-American lens. He has exhibited and performed as a solo and collaborative artist throughout the US in venues such as: de Young Museum, Asian Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Carlsbad Museum of Art, San Jose State University, Portland State University, Dominican University, University of Northern Colorado, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, Human Resources, and Torpedo Factory. Awards include a 2019 Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts, the 2019 International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, the 2018 Ella King Torrey Award for Innovation & Excellence in the Arts, and the 2017 Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Fellowship Award. 

As Above So Below by Sherwin Rio is generously sponsored by Mary Valledor and the Carlos Villa Estate, Dudley and Michael Del Balso, with additional support by Colin Fernandes and in kind contribution by Matt Katsaros and John Yoyogi Fortes.

Ann Hamilton

Process + Place: here • there • then • now

February 11 – April 29, 2023

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On the occasion of Headlands Center for the Arts’ 40th anniversary in 2022, Headlands joins 500 Capp Street for a project created by Ann Hamilton sited in both locations that highlights the deep connection between the two spaces and their shared stories of material and discovery.

At Headlands, artists David Ireland, Mark Thompson, and a team of collaborators transformed and opened the cluster of former military buildings to artists in 1986, creating an architectural condition that amplified and extended the vocabularies Ireland developed in his ongoing living project on Capp Street. Within this framework, Hamilton responded to these conditions in her 1989-1991 renovation of Headlands’ Mess Hall, transforming the space into a comfortable and inviting gathering place where meals are shared, collaborations are inspired, and creative revelations arise. Also in 1989, Hamilton was in residence at Capp Street Project with an installation entitled Privations and Excesses.

Now, Hamilton returns to both sites for here •  there • then • now, reaching across time and place to form an engagement, reflection, and response. During a research residency at 500 Capp Street in November 2022, Hamilton selected objects  from Ireland’s practice, exploring the typology of their forms and materiality, and scanned each to create luminous images that will be on display along with a newspaper print that will be available as a free, take home memento.

Further connecting the domestic scale of 500 Capp Street with the institutional scale of Headlands’ studio buildings, Hamilton is developing a sculptural audio element that will call across the distance to connect the near at hand with the far away—a pulse, connection, collaboration reaching across time, then and now.  

Sponsors: Process + Place: Ann Hamilton, here • there • then • now at 500 Capp Street is generously sponsored by Fraenkel Gallery, Evans Hankey, and Kathy Klausner & Benedict Strebel as KEYHOLDER sponsors, Sarah Wendell Sherrill & Stephen Sherrill as LIGHTKEEPER sponsors, Casey & Tania Koon, and Jennifer Wechsler as GROUNDBREAKER sponsors. 

Process + Place : Ann Hamilton, here •  there • then • now, will have satellite installation at the Headlands Center for the Arts on view from February 12 to March 19, 2023, at Building 944, 944 Simmonds Road, Sausalito, CA 94965.

More information on Headlands Center for the Arts Anniversary, Process + Place: Headlands at 40 here.

About Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally acclaimed for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton’s art extends outwards from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the tactile and metaphoric center of her installations. To enter their liminality is to be drawn equally into the sensory and linguistic capacities of comprehension that construct our faculties of memory, reason and imagination.

In a time when successive generations of technology amplify human presence at distances far greater than the reach of the hand, what becomes the place and form of making at the scale and pace of the individual body? How does making participate in the recuperation and recognition of embodied knowledge? What are the places and forms for live, tactile, visceral, face-to-face experiences in a media saturated world? These concerns have animated the site responsive installations that have formed the bulk of Hamilton’s practice over the last 20 years. But where the relations of cloth, sound, touch, motion and human gesture once gave way to dense materiality, Hamilton’s work now focuses on the less material acts of reading, speaking and listening. The influence of collaborative processes in ever more complex architectures has shifted her forms of making, wherein the movement of the viewer in time and in space now becomes a central figure of the work.

Process + Place: Ann Hamilton, here • there • then • now at 500 Capp Street is generously sponsored by Fraenkel Gallery, Evans Hankey, and Kathy Klausner & Benedict Strebel as KEYHOLDER sponsors, Sarah Wendell Sherrill & Stephen Sherrill as LIGHTKEEPER sponsors, Casey & Tania Koon, and Jennifer Wechsler as GROUNDBREAKER sponsors.

David Ireland

A Solo Exhibition

Opening June 24, 2023 

Exhibition run: June 24 – December 16, 2023

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THE CONDITION WHERE ART WOULD DISAPPEAR brings out some of David Ireland’s most iconic works to explore questions surrounding conceptual art and the issues artists confront when deep in studio work. The rooms of the House will be populated with works that will, for the first time since 500 Capp Street’s public opening, reconstruct what was in these spaces when Ireland was working and living at 500 Capp Street from 1974 to 2004. These iconic tableaux will illuminate how Ireland navigated between the correlation of work and site and will cast light on the point in his work where the studio became the central object of the art itself. On view will be such treasures as Marcel B. (1980-1994), a cascade of sardine cans that serve as a pun-like homage to fellow artist Marcel Broodthaers; Ireland’s sculptural tribute to Yves Klein; and his South China Chairs (1979), arranged as they were with the well-known Broom Collection with Boom (1978/1988) between them.

Ireland would also be known to say, “You can’t make art by making art.” This statement has become one of Ireland’s best-known quotes and it’s often used to summarize the philosophy that guided his Zen-like, interdisciplinary practice. Concerned with formal and material invention and in happenings outside the sphere of marketable art, his work explores complex questions of creativity, the role of the artist, and the meaning of art. To Ireland, it all boils down to what an artist is willing  to step into or away from, so that they can form their own artistic experience, even if it means forgetting all the accumulated meaning, history or original purpose of a known object, process or site. He would mention that it would take a certain amount of strength or belief, to what is known as “the leap of faith” to value what’s most important to a practice in the studio: an unrelenting commitment to the process of discovery.

THE CONDITION WHERE ART WOULD DISAPPEAR is generously sponsored by Geoffrey De Sousa, with additional support by Suzanne Hellmuth and Jock Reynolds, Anglim/Trimble Gallery and in kind contribution by Small Works and Rico Duenas.

Opening June 24, 2023

Exhibition run: June 24 – August 26, 2023

In conjunction with this exhibition of Ireland’s work, 500 Capp Street celebrates the launch of its newly-named Paule Anglim Archive Room, opening the space to the public for the first time for a special archival exhibition. Named after one of San Francisco’s most important gallerists who represented and championed Ireland and many other local conceptual artists, the Paule Anglim Archive Room houses objects, artworks, photographs, and ephemera that serve as an essential time capsule of the conceptual art movement of the 1970s-90s in the Bay Area and beyond. In 2022, Anglim’s estate donated several small artworks, papers, and more to 500 Capp Street, enriching the archive with works by many of Ireland’s contemporaries including Gay Outlaw, Paul Kos, Enrique Chagoya, William T. Wiley, Tom Marioni, Tony Labat, and Alan Rath. Select works from the newly expanded collection will be on display alongside pieces from Ireland’s personal collection and works by female conceptual artists from his circle including Hannah Wilke, Mildred Howard, Katherine Sherwood, Amy Trachtenberg, Ann Hamilton, Mie Preckler, Catherine Wagner, and Peggy Ingalls. Also on view are other donated or loaned works including several gifted by Jim Melchert and William T. Wiley’s 1977 book, Suite of Daze, on loan from printmaker Timothy Berry; and a just announced loan from Suzanne Hellmuth and Jock Reynolds of works by Nayland Blake, Paul DeMarinis, Bob Jones, and Jim Pomeroy. Screening in the Garage, will be Same Difference (1975), a film by Al Wong with sound by Terry Fox on loan from Canyon Cinema. Catalogs, personal correspondence, and other ephemera documenting the lives and careers of Ireland and his contemporaries will also be on display. 

The Paule Anglim Archive Room is accepting archival and research appointments. Email visit@500cappstreet.org to inquire.

Launch of the Paule Anglim Archive Room is generously sponsored by Geoffrey De Sousa, with additional support by Suzanne Hellmuth and Jock Reynolds, Anglim/Trimble Gallery and in kind contribution by Rico Duenas.