Introductions 2021

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Introductions 2021 was presented at Root Division, San Francisco, in September 2021 as part of the 2nd Saturday Exhibition Series.

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EXHIBITION DATES : JURORS :

August 25 – September 18, 2021 Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander Assistant Curator of American Art Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University Ken Harman Hashimoto Curator & Founder Hashimoto Contemporary Jovanna Venegas Curatorial Assistant of Contemporary Art SFMOMA

EXHIBITING ARTISTS :

Bijan Bucket Worldly Sistah (Tracy Brown) Jillian Crochet Laura DeAngelis Emily Gui Whitney Humphreys Natasha Loewy Yuki Maruyama Alexander Feliciano Mejía Ariella Robinson Adrianne Smits Jess Young

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Introductions installation detail

by Graham Holoch

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Detail image: Jess Young Lucky Patchwork, 2018 Cut and re-patched woodblock prints on recycled cotton, digital prints of archived letters on organza 72 x 72 x 4 in.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword | Michelle Mansour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 From the Jurors: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Ken Harman Hashimoto, Jovanna Venegas Memorials, Portals, and Other Ways. . . . . . . . . . . 14 to See in the Dark | Renée Rhodes Bijan Bucket. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Worldly Sistah (Tracy Brown). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Jillian Crochet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Laura DeAngelis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Emily Gui. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Whitney Humphreys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Natasha Loewy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Yuki Maruyama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Alexander Feliciano Mejía. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Ariella Robinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Adrianne Smits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Jess Young. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

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foreword

MICHELLE MANSOUR Executive Director Root Division

Introductions has been a core part of Root Division’s annual Exhibitions programming since 2007. Conceived as an opportunity to bridge a gap left when the San Francisco Arts Dealer Association (SFADA) discontinued their 30-year summer programming of the same name, Introductions has become a mainstay of our roster. This show highlights talent in the Bay Area and creates connections for artists with commercial galleries and beyond.

Root Division acts as a nexus for the production and presentation of visual art. Our goal is to serve as a connector between artists, the larger art community, and the general public. We offer an entry point for artists as they develop and hone their professional practice.

Especially as the art community has faced an exodus of artists moving outside San Francisco and to other cities in search of a more sustainable life AND with the reverberation of the hit to the city’s most financially unstable populations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Root Division is holding course in its position as an anchor for artists to remain in the Bay Area. Celebrating our sixth year in our 13,000 square foot facility and over 18 years as an arts organization, Root Division continues to be a beacon for the visual arts in our city, especially amidst so much challenge and uncertainty.

Introductions begins each year as an open call to any Bay Area artist whose work is not currently represented by a local gallery. Reviewed by a committee of three arts

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professionals representing a diversity of commercial, non-profit, and educational venues, the exposure for any submitting artist is invaluable. Each year we are encouraged and impressed by the quality of submissions, and we are surprised by the number of outstanding artists still operating under the radar of commercial representation. Our intent is to capture both the aesthetic and conceptual magic that comes from cultivating this new crop of budding talent.

This year our jurors — Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Ph.D. (Assistant Curator of American Art & Co-Director, Asian American Art Initiative, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University); Ken Harman Hashimoto (Curator & Founder, Hashimoto Contemporary); and Jovanna Venegas (Curatorial Assistant of Contemporary Art, SFMOMA) selected twelve artists through intensive review. In these pages, you will find an essay by Renée Rhodes (Root Division’s Art Programs Manager) contextualizing the work of each artist and bringing the works into conversation with one another as well as within a larger discourse of art practice. Root Division is happy to provide an opportunity for these twelve artists to add to the conversation of contemporary Bay Area art, especially in assertion that the San Francisco art community has a unique voice. We are proud to debut this group of artists and to support their continued artistic and professional development.

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From The Jurors ALEESA PITCHAMARN ALEXANDER, PH.D. Assistant Curator of American Art & Co-director Asian American Art Initiative Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

The last 17 months have irrevocably changed all of us in ways immediately obvious and yet-to-be-seen. While the seemingly never-ending beat of anxiety-producing news drums in the background, we must remember to find hope and solace where we can. I have always looked to artists during such historic moments, for they are our greatest historians, inventors, and prophets. Root Division’s annual Introductions show provides a platform for meaningful encounters with the work of contemporary Bay Area artists, and this year’s iteration offers quasarbright flashes of optimism for the future. While some of the work included in this show can be interpreted in reference to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, much of what is represented here goes beyond our immediate moment. The vast scope of our selections, which are diverse in media, content, and stylistic approach, remind us that there is so much richness to be explored in us as individuals, in our communities, and in the lands we occupy.

It was quite difficult to narrow our choices down to twelve artists, which is a testament to the strength of artistic production in the Bay Area. As a juror, I would like to celebrate the artists selected while also honoring all those who submitted — to put one’s work out there takes courage and resolve. May we all be inspired in challenging times by the creative courage of artists.

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KEN HARMAN HASHIMOTO Curator & Founder Hashimoto Contemporary

Much has already been said about the chaotic, lonely, and downright scary year that we’ve collectively endured these past many months. Countless scholars, essayists, and curators have already spoken at length in regards to the hobbling effects of COVID-19 on our city and art scene, the diasporic effects of gentrification for the local arts community, and the woeful state of public funding and support for the arts generally speaking.

However, just as much has also been said about the endurance of the human spirit, the inspiring and ongoing fight for equality by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities, and the resourcefulness of the arts industry in an unprecedented time of social upheaval and technological adaptation.

Introductions 2021 serves not just as a record of these times, both good and bad, but also acts as a reminder that no matter what happens, no matter who’s in higher office, or who’s in the streets protesting, that art and its creators are an ever-present constant in an everchanging world.

If artwork can be made during these times, I take solace in knowing that I’ll be introduced to new art at galleries, museums, artist studios, online, and at Root Division — not just next year but also for all the years to come. Call me naive, but I believe that the introductions made today will invariably lead to friendships and new relationships tomorrow, regardless of what the future holds.

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JOVANNA VENEGAS Curatorial Assistant of Contemporary Art SFMOMA

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We are still living through the aftershock of the pandemic.

The inequalities that existed before became even more visible, and political differences took on such a force that wearing a mask to protect yourself and others symbolized your ideology. At the same time, the climate crisis also became impossible to ignore when last summer, a dark orange sky enveloped the entire Bay Area for one day.

And still, in this precarity, networks of solidarity also emerged. Mutual aid helped members in our community with food, housing, and medicine. Within uncertainty, artists offered us glimpses into alternative worlds and helped us imagine a better future. The artists selected for Introductions demonstrate an unrelenting resilience, pushing their practices forward even through unsettling conditions. They explore a range of materials and approach present-day issues with care and eloquence.

Their interests vary from climate change to disability rights and labor systems, among many others. As the Bay Area saw an exodus of tech workers, who had made it almost impossible for artists to live in, it is exciting to see this next chapter in the region. This exhibition captures the artistic pulse in the Bay Area at this moment and affirms the vitality of art through distressing times.

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Memorials, Portals, and Other Ways to See In the Dark RENEE RHODES Art Programs Manager Root Division

Our yearly Introductions exhibition offers a moment of pause and reflection that reminds us to take notice of what marks this moment in time. How will it be remembered, and how are our storytellers memorializing it? As we continue into the portal of change brought about by the lingering pandemic and the intersecting social break-downs that cascade around it, I see the artists in this year’s Introductions exhibition as humble workers.

Making art is a daily practice of quieting the mind and finding something useful to do with one’s hands.

The works in Introductions 2021 illuminate several thematic pathways. We see works that ruminate on loss and impermanence; that respond to the impacts of technology on our bodies and social structures; and object-making and storytelling that reclaims generational traumas and harmful erasures. Blocky sculptures on the verge of collapse, sun-faded drawings for take-away, site-specific mandalas made of sandstone, painted memorials to landscapes lost to fire or friends lost to the opioid epidemic — many of the works in the show offer philosophical and tangible entry points into processing change and loss. Through these works impermanence can be seen as a marker of this moment.

Another path that cuts through the show centers on tactile pop-forward manifestations of technology’s impact on our bodies, our perception, and our very social fabric. These works explore disorientationing vantage points through the creation of hand-painted op-art installations, handmade paper installations made of Amazon.com boxes, and slow-crafted quilts that stitch together fragments from our image saturated culture.

Splitting off from this is a current of works that reflect on the body, as trained into and in rejection of, linear

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systems. Through videos, screenprints, and sculptures we see projects that offer a more circular and feminist presentation of the body, one that reclaims a personalized embodied relation to technological, medical, and ecological systems.

Circling back to the beginning, we see loss through a different lens. A collection of sculptures, digital videos, and textile works which provide restorative and cathartic responses to generational traumas and the erasures of cultural memory. Assemblage is a strong strategy here. In this collection we see montaging of documentary based films, found objects collaged together, and again quilting as a way to remember.

Introductions is a generative way to uplift emerging Bay Area artists, and this year I am especially encouraged by this group of talented makers, tending to the imperfect in our world, carrying on in their daily practices of reflection, and offering us myriad ways to see in the dark.

Barely balanced stacks of cinder blocks, tidy piles of sunfaded drawings that diminish through distribution, heavy concrete columns in slow spinning motion — Natasha

Loewy’s sculptural works operate in the balance between stability and collapse, permanence and impermanence.

Through minimal formalism these works speak as koans, poems, or even slight jokes. Her works point to impending fractures, erosions, dislocations and invoke a sense of healing through the suggestion of cathartic breakage. We watch and wait, hoping to experience a release of the tension held in the pursuit of stability.

Bijan Bucket creates paintings layered with personal

symbologies. Each work creates worlds of memorialization

through surrealistic figuration and the accumulation of remembered fragments: a loved one’s eyes, a favorite leopard print backdrop for his Mom, the color of a feeling.

The works come together as would the fleeting fragments of a dream. Loving acts of devotion, many of these works memorialize loved ones lost to the ongoing opioid epidemic, while others hold close those still here. Through mashups of color, texture, pattern, expressive figures and vibrant backdrops, Bucket’s lyrical works explore the psychological spaces of loss and letting go.

Laura DeAngelis creates spacious works that act to

memorialize what remains in a climate changed world.

Her current works are influenced by the experience of evacuating from her home to flee from wildfires in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the summer of 2020.

Her works in this exhibition consist of a series of cyanotypes documenting found monuments in the form of chimneys — all that is left standing after the fire passes — and a large wall-sized mandala made of ground sandstone clay. Applied slowly, day-by-day, these sandstone works are an act of timekeeping and daily reflection. The piece emerges finally, revealing the stratified layers of its creation, taking on the appearance of an old growth tree with rings to count the decades gone by. Here she reflects the biological and geological stories of the place she inhabits.

Zooming in through an ecologist’s lens, Adrianne Smits directs our view to the tangled troubles of presentday forests. Her submerged perspective focuses us on small and not-so-monumental places and post-fire ecosystems. These are not landscape paintings of the sublime Cartesian view, but instead we see tangled thickets overwhelming forest floors and burnt-out tree

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stumps subsumed by un-tended new growth. We become attuned to the cycles as they will happen again. We become attuned to the look of abandoned land. Her works are large-scale, painted with exquisite attention to detail and careful brushstrokes. Within these worlds her background as a trained scientist merges with her desire to create a visual story from within the ruins.

With Emily Gui’s works, we zoom out to the level of human systems as an overlay. This time we see the trees become a forest of boxes in an Amazon distribution center. Through the creation of paper handmade from pulped Amazon.com boxes, Gui points to the culture of disposability bound up in American consumer culture, while challenging the trajectories of uncared for creation and unchecked waste streams. With her recycled paper as the material starting place, Gui creates hollow forms of familiar domestic objects: chairs, cups, chargers, extension cords, bottles, hand tools, and light bulbs.

The ghost objects are stacked and piled, hoarded and overflowing, pointing to a system of over-consumption and to the dissatisfying temporary objects that fill our domestic environs. From click, to ship, to planned obsolescence, Gui interrupts a runaway waste stream, circling it back to a process of devoted and handcrafted labor.

Whitney Humphreys’s works point to the constraints

of a techno-fixed culture on the body, exploring historical patterns that create linkages — in language and aesthetics — between computers, militarization, and women’s labor and bodies. In her screenprints, she creates collages of imagery, building connections between historical reference points from military missile blueprints, to early computer schematics, to patterns for the control and containment of the female body. Corsets, bras, and elaborate vintage hoop skirts are mainstays of her aesthetic oeuvre. Her sculptures overlay these cultural systems of control and order onto handmade textiles, alluding directly to these histories of containment, while referencing the messiness and dynamism of actual bodies and their implied subjectivities.

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Through the creation of pseudo-scientific tableaus, collaboration with plants and algaes, and the development of narratives exploring biological and genetic fictions, Jillian Crochet seeks to reclaim systems, spaces, and timescales through a framework of disability.

Her sculptural works often challenge the image of disability culture as inextricably linked to medical systems of control and experimentation. She reclaims these aesthetic sensibilities through her own experimentation and storytelling: hand-cast silicone containers (“lumpariums”) contain bubbling algaes and sticky mud which suggest relatable, if imperfect, systems of care and examination. Crochet’s video work It’s Ok features a performance with an aloe plant, wherein the action of soothing seems to be one of mutual exchange — a rumination on touch and comfort during the isolation of the pandemic. Installed in Root Division’s recently decluttered elevator, this work is also an act of reclaiming accessibility as a norm while ruminating on timescales of care, collaboration, and self-advocacy.

Yuki Maruyama creates large-scale installations and

murals that tune into the subjectivity of visual perception itself. Employing tricks and techniques that persuade the mind to perceive 2D space as 3D space, Maruyama creates layered forms that drip, bubble, and pop from out of highly ordered linework. By alternating hues of red and cyan, her paintings vibrate in and out of dimensionality, disorient the eye, and create gleeful confusions. Her optical environments, often viewed through 3D glasses, offer ambiguous and fluid spaces that render the built world as a place that first induces visual excitement, and then a disorienting anxiety if one looks for too long. These works offer analogue examples of the spatial perceptions and misperceptions many of us experience as the lines between physical and virtual space continue to blur.

Arielle Robinson works to build connective bridges

between the historical and present tense states of photography. She looks back on the medium as an archival project, while seeing the present-day challenge of synthesizing the digital cacophony. Her works are

physicalizations of the speeds and flows of the internet.

What if we saw the flood of images as a place to move though, or could synthesize it down into an object — a collection of scraps to quilt together? Or what if we can barely remember what we saw ten scrolls ago? Robinson’s works combine a multiplicitous practice of sourcing found photographs, politically or pop-culturally relevant memes, everyday personal cellphone pics — all collected, collaged, mashed-up, and quilted together — the fragmented nature of our current social memory momentarily stilled and preserved into a tactile form.

works center on building connectivity between here and there for this diasporic community. He builds friendships with the team, films their weekly games, and co-creates edits with them, that they then send back to their family members in San Juan Atitán. In an on-going film project, Mejía himself has begun working in San Juan Atitán to create another film directly with MayaMam community members there. Mejía’s films have a deeply person-centered intimacy to them, which comes out of an approach to filmmaking centered in a spirit of collaboration and community.

Mashups of past and present are also found in the

Lastly, Jess Young creates quilts and installations that hone in on fragments of family memories, lost via the decentering impacts of migration, immigration to the U.S., and assimilation. Their bright wall-scaled quilts reflect familiarity, but also act as portals. In Patchwork of Letters: A One Way Window Young stitches and sews vintage sugar sacks, turmeric dyed bed sheets, and other fabrics while translating their grandmother’s letters — written after immigrating to San Francisco. The devotional action of quilting together fragments of fabric emulates the process of translating these scraps of their grandmother’s identity back into a full picture. Language, story, and generational memory lost to the process of immigration and assimilation is carefully reclaimed and reimagined through Young’s inquisitive works.

sculptural assemblages of Worldly

Sistah (Tracy

Brown). Her works feature familiar found objects

and imagery, like Fisher-Price toys, MAGA hats, and reconstructed food stamps. Through her assembled forms she creates satirical reflections of the powerful systems that shape collective and personal identity formation. If you look closely, you will find that Brown’s works are embedded with rich symbolic references: a food stamp features figureheads who profited from the slave trade of the past, alongside tobacco industry executives who profit from its vestiges into the present; a mannequin representing a person of African ancestry wears a MAGA hat and a reproduction of a chattel slave punishment collar; a Fisher-Price toy whose typical white-washed iconography is replaced as a commentary on the mass distribution of social bias, the school to prison pipeline and the role of public institutions. Brown’s layered and dynamic works serve as cathartic responses to generational traumas and the absorbed effects of white supremacy on communities of color and society as a whole.

Introductions 2021 illuminates once again, the regenerative power of storytelling and the everyday importance of creativity. We are so pleased to share the work of these twelve emerging artists with you and to honor their committed reflections of the complex and uncertain world that we each inhabit.

Alexander Feliciano Mejia creates documentary films

centered in decolonial practices of co-creation. His film project La Vieja Escuela/Field Notes features a soccer team participating in a Guatemalan League Tournament in Oakland, California. La Vieja Escuela’s team members hail from a small town in Guatemala called San Juan Atitán, which is an Indigenous Maya-Mam town. Mejía’s

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With Love, 2020 Mixed media on wood panel 72 x 48 x 3.75 in.

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From left to right: Can I Kill it, 2021 Mixed media on canvas 36 x 30 x 2 in.

March 15th, 2021 Mixed media on wood 24 x 18 x 4 in.

Bijan Bucket 19

Skinned Coon Cap, 2021 Mixed media including the bust of a dummy, a skinned coon, African coins, 3D printed slave punishment collar, paint, rust, rhinestones, an insane asylum lock, sheer and utter disgust and irritation, polyester 60 x 30 x 36 in

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The Artificial Price, 2018 Fisher-Price activity center, velum, African fabric, caution tape, chain, tin stars, shredded cash, a crib mobile, sequin thread, a sad photo, emotional fatigue, Mod Podge 68.5 x 48 x 36 in.

Mentholated Death Coupon: Courtesy of the Centers For The Advancement of Human Suffering, 2021 Digital print on Sintra, outrage, fatigue 25 x 48 x 7 in.

Worldly Sistah (Tracy Brown) 21

It’s ok ., 2019 Single channel HD video 03:11 mins

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Primordial Lumpariums, 2021 Algae from down da’ bayou, water, silicone, microporous membrane, silicone tubing, pump, found tables Dimensions Variable

Jillian Crochet 23

Temporal Body No.4, 2021 Sandstone, water Dimensions variable

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From left to right: New Monuments (Fallen Leaf) No.1, 2020 Cyanotype 24 x 18 in.

New Monuments (Fallen Leaf) No.3, 2020 Cyanotype 24 x 18 in.

New Monuments (Fallen Leaf) No.5, 2020 Cyanotype 24 x 18 in.

Laura DeAngelis 25

Unboxing, 2021 Handmade paper from Amazon.com boxes Dimensions Variable

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Related To Items You’ve Recently Viewed, 2021 Handmade paper from Amazon.com boxes Dimensions variable

Emily Gui 27

From top to bottom: He Taught Me How Things are Built, 2020 Screen print behind Plexiglas 30 x 44 in.

She Taught Me How to Build Myself, 2020 Screen print behind Plexiglas 30 x 44 in.

They Taught Me How Things are Built, 2020 Screen print behind Plexiglas 30 x 44 in.

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Implied Bodies, 2021 Mixed Media: printed textile sculptural assemblage 66 x 18 x 18 in.

Whitney Humphreys 29

parody of self, 2021 3 pavers, 3 rotating display stands 17.25 x 30 x 7.6 in.

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what’s holding me up is squishing me down, 2020 20 pavers & 1 ping pong ball 41.5 x 8 x 6 in.

Natasha Loewy 31

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Binocular Rivals: Vacillating Eye, 2021 Acrylic paint on drywall, anaglyph 3D glasses optional for viewing 120 x 90 x 60 in.

Yuki Maruyama 33

La Vieja Escuela/Field Notes, 2021 Three channel video installation Dimensions variable, 5:28 mins duration

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Alexander Feliciano Mejia 35

It is time the stone made an effort to flower, time unrest had a beating heart, 2021 Archival pigment on cotton, polyester batting, thread, satin bias tape 70 x 41 in.

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Malvenfarbenen II, 2021 Archival pigment on cotton, polyester batting, thread 48 x 36 in.

Ariella Robinson 37

From top to bottom: Redwoods 5, 2020 Pen on paper 14.5 x 19.5 in.

Redwoods 7, 2020 Pen on paper 14.5 x 19.5 in Redwoods 11, 2021 Pen on paper 14.5 x 19.5 in.

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Resting Place, 2021 Oil on canvas 96 x 144 in.

Adrianne Smits 39

Patchwork of Letters — A One Way Window, 2020 Recycled bedsheets dyed with turmeric, sugar sacks, thrifted satin, organza and cotton blend; handwritten family letters; found stools, mirror and plastic lilies 84 x 84 x 4 in.

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Lucky Patchwork, 2018 Cut and re-patched woodblock prints on recycled cotton, digital prints of archived letters on organza 72 x 72 x 4 in.

Jess Young 41

STAFF

Michelle Mansour . . . . . . . . . . Executive Director

Renée Rhodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . Art Programs Manager

Michael Gabrielle . . . . . . . . . . Education Programs Manager Phi Tran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marketing & Design Manager

Ronaldo Reyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . Facilities & Installations Manager

ChiChai Mateo . . . . . . . . . . . . . Development & Programs Assistant Rachel Welles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Operations Assistant

CATALOG PRODUCTION

Phi Tran & Michael Nguyen . . Graphic Design

Graham Holoch . . . . . . . . . . . . Exhibition Documentation

1131 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94103

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Root Division is a visual arts non-profit in San Francisco that connects creativity and community through a dynamic ecosystem of arts education, exhibitions, and studios. Root Division’s mission is to empower artists, foster community service, inspire youth, and enrich the Bay Area through engagement in the visual arts. The organization is a launching pad for artists, a steppingstone for educators and students, and a bridge for the general public to become involved in the arts.

Root Division is supported in part by a plethora of individual donors and by grants from National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, Grants for the Arts, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Kimball Foundation, Walter & Elise Haas Fund, Fleishhacker Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Violet World Foundation, and Bill Graham Memorial Fund.

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