#simulacra #simulacra #simulacra
gallery
Front cover: Qian Zhao. From the series “offcut-the edge,” 2014-2016. Altered for this publication.
#simulacra Mike Cole || UC Davis Shaghayegh Cyrous || CCA Shisi Huang || SFAI Jacqueline Sherlock Norheim || Mills Marcela Pardo Ariza || SFAI Tamara Porras || CCA Qian Zhao || CCA
curatorial statement #Simulacra asks how Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical treatise “Simulacra and Simulation” is relevant in the digital era. We live in a visual culture in which it is increasingly easy to participate. Images are all-important, and no longer mere symbols of truth. As Baudrillard predicted, reality itself has begun to imitate what was once its model. This medium-specific show explores signs, memory and documentation from a diverse sampling of perspectives.
Mike Cole and Jacqueline Sherlock Norheim both stray from traditional photography, utilizing the mark of the artist’s hand in two different takes on landscape, one manufactured and pixelated, the other ethereal and ephemeral.Shisi Huang’s video piece addresses voyeurism and the blurred line between public and private realities in an age where we are often being recorded. Marcela Pardo Ariza’s playful photographic sculpture references the unraveling of the meaning of images in the contemporary moment, whereas Qian Zhao’s deliciously colorful prints evoke a surreal nostalgia.
Tamara Porras investigates the past without nostalgia, exposing how photographs can take on a new life of their own once those pictured are gone. Shaghayegh Cyrous’ work is planted firmly in the present, taking the form of a live feed from an apartment in Tehran, Iran. The piece references the malleability of time and place made possible by new technologies and questions the nature of reality in an increasingly global world.
Angelica Jardini | Curatorial Director
Mike Cole | UC Davis “Time has multiple definitions and puts up a fight when corralled. A planet’s age is beyond our comprehension. Lightspeed is theory to the eye. riving across this country, I witness a landscape change by the hour yet service plazas and strip mall maintain familiar consistency. We are quickly moving from one era to the next, barely taking breaths between stories. The expectation of an image to connect us to these various notions of time, speed and place creates the groundwork for my investigations. I photograph, paint and build: piecemealed images, paintings balanced between their oiled skin and chalk-dry bones, reminders of our fragmented identities and the speed at which we move through this modern landscape.”
Big Rock, 2015. Oil, chalk & printed copy paper on linen.
Screenshot, 2016. Printed copy paper and push pins.
Shaghayegh Cyrous | CCA
A window to Tehran, 2016. Live video projection from Shabnam’s apartment on the 14th floor, overlooking the Alborz mountains. North of Tehran.
“I was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to San Francisco in 2011 due to the hard political situation in Iran at the time. My works deal with miscommunication and mistranslation caused by worldwide cultural and political circumstances. Using interactive strategies such as participatory engagement projects, performances, video, installations, live video chats and etc to create poetic spaces and opportunity for connection and communication. After my migration to US as an exile, I became interested in the time difference between Tehran and San Francisco. Tehran is twelve hours and thirty minutes into the future and San Francisco is twelve hours and thirty minutes into Tehran’s past. I started to get a sense of the compression of time-space by using technologies as a tool that allow me to connect to my home country live, video chatting technology such as Skype, Line and Telegram. These technologies are used by exiles and immigrants all around the world and reflect the new desires for communication beyond one's present time and location. Covering this huge distance to my home country has forced me to navigate two different spaces: the physical and the virtual.�
Shisi Huang | SFAI
Twelve O Nine, 2016. HD video 18:40 (loop).Monitor, iPhone5, door, door viewer, yellow duct tape.
Shisi Huang’s never before seen video installation considers the role of surveillance in the domestic sphere. Who is outside and who is in? The lines are blurred, but it is certain that someone is watching.
Jacqueline Sherlock Norheim | Mills
“The landscape around is is constantly shifting and changing, and all of my work is based on a desire to capture this essence of constant transformation. I explore the idea of landscape as something we relate to both physically and psychologically. In these sculptures and wall hangings, I have printed and transferred images of the cultural and natural landscape onto paper, nylon and canvas. I subvert the literal view of the landscape by overlapping, folding, and hooking images together. Photographs of my surroundings are distorted and warped by physically abstracting them, the way you might in Adobe Photoshop. I translate digital editing techniques into a physical process to create a new relationship to the landscapes that surround us.�
Opposite page: Fallen Landscape: The Western Fold, 2015. Archival print on nylon (left) Revlon Rock, 2015. Nylon, polyester, spray paint, archival image, acrylic, pins.
Marcela Pardo Ariza | SFAI
Hanging on the Line, 2016. Inkjet print and ash. Opposite page [right] shows back side.
Through the use of wry humor and queerness, I engage with the medium of photography and sculpture to create compositionally arranged and colorful scenarios that embed the uncanny within the mundane. By incorporating quotidian objects in seemingly absurd ways, these tableaux reference recognizable situations mixed with a hint of magical realism.
Tamara Porras | CCA “A photograph peeks out from a pile of detritus inside an abandoned garage in one of the three remaining homes from Love Canal, a town in upstate New York that today is a grid of truncated driveways and the gestures of former houses now overgrown with weeds. Love Canal was a planned community settled by young families for two decades in the 1950s-1970s, before it was made public that it was a highly toxic chemical dumping site for Hooker Chemical. Except for those three homes, the town was evacuated and demolished by 1980. “notes from love canal” is a series of photographic objects created from vernacular photographs found at the Love Canal site.
untitled (she could be), 2016. Archival pigment print mounted on board.
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. Pages from “what was left: photographs from love canal new york,” 2016. Offset printing on paper, open ed.
These found prints were altered by the earth and elements at Love Canal - dirt from the Superfund site adhered to family faces, or presumably contaminated water transferred a face from one print onto another. The people in the photographs are unknown to us - perhaps relatives of the house’s former owner, perhaps not. As snapshots, however, they activate the presumption of veracity in photographs. Yet, as presented here, they are entirely a fiction. A woman whose face is obscured by dirt, distressed emulsion, and chemical decay becomes a symbol for the former residents of Love Canal, though she herself may have never lived at the site or even set foot there. The photographs transcend their original intention and truths upon rediscovery and recontextualization. This interaction between the landscape, the prints, and their uncovering has created an alternate, poetic history of Love Canal - one that asks us to reconsider what transpired there and where those who experienced it might be today.”
Qian Zhao | CCA
“offcut-the edge,” 2014-2016. Series. Archival pigment prints
“This series is based on my daily life and imagination. I keep a distance from the city I now live in. Landmarks, shopping malls and new neighborhoods help me to constructed an unreal city in images and memory: a fictitious city that is based on an actual place but that is transformed by an associative process. With people seeming to appear out of mist, the slightly off-kilter images connect to something odd but interesting. These images ask viewers to look again, to step closer, to investigate what might be there in that other dimension.�
Acknowledgements Lauren Dare Marcel Houtzager Matt Lopez Brooke Valentine Xiao Wang Sartle.com Thor, Zeus & Jasper Juried by Julie Casemore of Casemore Kirkeby Gallery, and Allie Haeusslein of Pier 24 Photography.
Embark Gallery offers exhibition opportunities to graduate students of the Fine Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. We provide a space for an engaged community of artists, curators and scholars, and we aim to expand the audience for up and coming contemporary art. A non-profit gallery, Embark’s programming represents the diversity of the talented artists studying at eight local art institutions: San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Mills College, San Francisco State University, UC Davis, San Jose State University, and Stanford. The juried exhibitions are held at our gallery in San Francisco at the historic Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.
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