Humor US
9.10.16 - 10.22.16
g a l l e r y
Humor US Douglas Angulo | SFAI Nathan Becka | CCA Boris Scherbakov | Mills Kaitlin Trataris | SFAI France Viana | Mills Hui Meng Wang | SFAI Jin Zhu | UC Berkeley Curated by Tanya Gayer | CCA
Curatorial Statement ‘Snarky’ best describes the type of art that I focus on in my research, exhibit in curatorial projects, and hang on the walls in my home. I appreciate how such work asks viewers to question their beliefs and interests, while at the same time provides the blush of laughter often needed for white cube exhibition spaces or daily life. Humor US hinges upon the value of snarkiness as requisite for the onslaught of anxieties my colleagues and I face following graduate school, and at the height of the election season. In the Bay Area especially, we find ourselves in an insurmountable amount of student debt, amongst a deficit of full time jobs with benefits, and at an impasse of affordable housing bigger than 100 square feet. As we look towards the upcoming election to respond to these concerns, we encounter disparaging comments and questionable campaign tactics. It seems appropriate to respond to these actions with an equally startling nature: humor and wit. Through installations, videos, and photographs the artists exhibited in Humor US display personal experiences of disenfranchisement, criticisms of the American Dream, and platforms for positive social and political change made possible by the simplicity of listening to one another. Jin Zhu’s video piece sets the tone for the exhibition by providing viewers with a historical context to the welltrodden path associated with Western politics––the disruption and marginalization of the ‘other’ by the white male. Douglas Angulo’s video piece, and his deafening stare within it, builds on Zhu’s concepts and asks us to take a hard look inward to consider how we form and project identity, and construct misconceptions of identity. The questions Angulo poses are especially relevant given the ebb and flow of the 2016 political candidates disingenuously siding with various specific communities of the American population to gain their trust and vote.
The work of France Viana and Hui Meng Wang questions what it means to step in and out of traditional and individual identity in the US, through a photographic exploration and video piece, respectively. Viana searches for answers in the neighborhoods of Filipino Americans and confronts their political values against her own. In a satirical commentary on the emerging Chinese middle class, Wang’s video investigates the alarming disconnection between their idealized lifestyle and the actual reality that is increasingly shaped by the political and social interests of the West. Nathan Becka's objects and the installation of Kaitlin Trataris mock the blind acceptance that follows campaign endorsements and empty promises given by both powerful figures and everyday citizens, all under the guise of chasing the American Dream. Finally, it is Boris Scherbakov’s sound installation that presents viewers with some answers to the question of how to grapple with the current political elections: to truly listen to our everyday surroundings and focus on conversations that lead to greater cultural and political understanding. Although this exhibition will close just three weeks from Election Day, it is not meant to provide any presidential endorsements. It is here to recognize the social and political values held by Bay Area graduate students. Once we exit academia our dreams and goals shift regardless of what higher education or political leaders promise us. We encounter a sudden and tough reality. What better way to face it than with a sly smile and biting quip?
- Tanya Gayer
Guest curator and winner of our call for exhibition proposals.
Douglas Angulo | SFAI
My artwork seeks to critique the pursuit and display of status in contemporary American culture, particularly within the context of social networks and user generated media. Through a series of self-reflexive portraits, my work discusses self-consciousness, narcissism, and depersonalization in the virtual world. I am depicting not only the virtual world present in social media, but also the one constructed in our minds. New media are changing the ways we form and project our identities, and how we perceive status in America. I achieve my conceptual goals in several ways. I create trompe-l’oeil frames, whose gaudiness and tackiness overshadow the subject inside. The frames become symbols of the alluring and illusive nature of status, and the separation between the real and the virtual. In addition, I create short videos that are placed into dialogue and offer context to my paintings. Humor brings perspective to my delusional depictions, these delineations of First World anxieties.
Nathan Becka | CCA My practice is a once-great manufacturing company called Cheap American Domestic. At its height, it would be hard to find a market sector or industry to which it did not provide the highest quality American-made products at the absolutely best prices. The company prided itself on providing complete satisfaction to all of its customers and its employees worked to make products that customers could feel good about. Practically innumerable variations of each product were made in order to exactly fit the needs and character of each customer. This worked so well for the brand that they strode forward with a confidence so unstoppable that they did not notice when the model stopped working.
Despite its myriad products and endless capability, the company became less and less relevant and fell into all but total obscurity. Customers no longer found satisfaction in Cheap American Domestic’s products. Since then the company has been in the process of going out of business for what seems like forever, but never has managed to reach total dissolution. In the meantime, products continue to be made of a weirder and weirder nature. Perhaps Cheap American Domestic is too exhausted, astonished, or just sad from making the realization that so many resources had been squandered on the wrong priorities. Or, maybe, the company has begun to feel a sort of security in being too inconsequential to fail and have decided to forego any future attempts at satisfying anyone.
Boris Scherbakov | Mills
Put simply, my work is about providing people with a platform for listening. Using a combination of spatial intervention, sonic elaboration, and quotidian content, my work challenges viewers to discover and nourish their sensitivity to the meaning and musicality of everyday life. Humor and irony are two strategies that I employ to provide the listener both a means of instant gratification as well as a subtle portal into deeper messages lingering in the work.
Kaitlin Trataris | SFAI
I am a survivor of a failed attempt at the American dream. My parents tried to make real for themselves this imaginary domestic space that both housed and perpetuated the ideals set forth for them. The microwave dinners followed by regularly scheduled television established our purpose as consumers. We became part of an industrial equation only finding relief through fantasy. The staged fabric kitchen objects are stand ins for people, held in place and consequently controlled by an invisible thread. Their forms buckle in a comically personified way, unable to meet their expected functions, rejecting the foods and objects that promised them an ideal domestic existence. These surreal scenes begin to rectify the gap between the harshness of my reality and the fantasies I create to protect myself from the traumas of an unstable home; giving once frigid forms a softness and absurdity that disarms them.
France Viana | Mills
For my generation of Filipino American immigrants, isolation has been replaced by hyperconnectivity, and today thanks to Skype, Facebook and more, we carry on conversations in two countries, literally at the same time. What effect does this stepping in and out of cultures, done as gracefully as the Filipino tinikling bamboo dance, do to our identity? What happens to our collective unconscious when the venue for the mandatory Sunday Filipino American family outing changes from Catholic Church to Target? These are some of the questions I ask as I track changing values to tell a new story. My processes involve mining Philippine and Filipino American historical sources, social media, myths and puns. I also trawl Filipino American neighborhoods, particularly Daly City and Pacifica, looking for evidence of their cultural values, often values that are shared with Hispanics. Sometimes, as in this case, the sign says it all and an unannotated, deadpan photograph is the best approach.
Hui Meng Wang | SFAI
A Beginner’s Guide to the Art of Throwing the Perfect Chocolate Fountain Party is a 12-minute film shot in Herbst Pavilion, Fort Mason. The film focuses on an absurd chocolate fountain party, where Betty, the hostess, and Bob, the host, invite two friends to dine with them. The script is adapted from a 1945 television commercial which is a stressful presentation on table etiquette instead of instructing, the narrator points out all the faux-pas of the dinner party guests in a fast, relentless voiceover. In the new script, such table etiquette is designed to be humorous and satirical. The film is a dramatized presentation of individual and collective anxieties in the process of establishing a new cultural identity. It also explores the disconnection between a fantasized, performed “reality” and the actual reality, and particularly, how mass-produced, carefully curated messages intended for consumer audiences are influencing people’s conception of an ideal lifestyle.
Jin Zhu | UC Berkeley
Bradenton, Florida, is the site of a national memorial dedicated to Hernando DeSoto’s landing in America. It is also the site of an annual re-enactment. For this piece, ranger Dan, who plays a friar, read the text of the 1513 Requirement on the beach that is the purported site of the historic landing. A local mobile notary witnesses the reading and notarizes the legal document in the park visitor’s center, among the exhibits on the history of the DeSoto expedition. During Spanish landings, the Requirement was read to natives (or empty beaches) and notarized. It was perhaps the first legal disclaimer in the Americas, absolving conquistadors of responsibility for damages or death, and giving natives a clear choice between conversion and submission, or war and ruin. Against an idyllic backdrop of leisure populated by sailboats and tourists, the performance becomes an absurd and humorous critique of the colonial practice of using documents as instruments to legitimize conquest.
Acknowledgments Lauren Dare Marcel Houtzager Matt Lopez Brooke Valentine Xiao Wang Sartle.com Thor, Zeus & Jasper
Tania Houtzager | Executive Director Nicole Aponte | Education Director Angelica Jardini | Curatorial Director Christopher Squier | Programs Director
EmbarkGallery.com | Fort Mason Center | 2 Marina Blvd. Bldg B, Ste 330. SF, CA 94123