Curatorial Letter

See / Change 2020 invites nine Bay Area artists to create an original work and then provide a creative prompt for the viewer to respond to that work. Each is or was a part of San Francisco Arts Education as a mentor through our programs. Their thoughtful and distinct responses are a testament to the deeply personal nature of art making.

This exhibition was planned well in advance of the very big change that we are now experiencing in our world. I find it so heartening to know that these artists, with their deeply investigated practices and clear ideas about our world, all continue to educate young people. We are talking a lot about heroes in our community, now. These artists are among mine.

– Emily Keeler
SFArtsED Artistic Director

Read the full curatorial letter here.

How to Participate

Review the artist’s work and description.
Follow the corresponding prompt.
Send your art to info@sfartsed.org to be featured on SFArtsED’s Instagram and Facebook.

Alexis Arnold | Untitled (Chromalith II)

Manipulated color-shifting dichroic film is cast in resin to explore perception, light, space, color, and material. The film shifts colors drastically, as well as projects a colorful shadow in a changing array that differs from those seen on the sculpture. Individual perception of the work can vary from person to person depending on viewing angle and lighting, exploring how we may not all perceive color, or a multiple of other things, the same. The optical effects help make the stationary sculpture appear kinetic. The work is further inspired by iridescent minerals and how these specimens are traditionally displayed in natural history museums.

Viewer Prompt

Explore how color itself is objective, but one’s perception of it can be contextual and subjective.

The Exploratorium has a bunch of simple activities, along with explanations, to explore color perception at home: color contrast, colored shadow, bird-in-cage, color table.

Optical color illusions: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.

Alexis Arnold | Motley

Driftwood, a material laden with connotations in the context of art and craft, has been disguised through the application of automotive paint and combined with industrial materials (concrete and acrylic). The prismatic effect of the paint, which alter with changes in light or perspective, initiates viewer interaction through the visual play of
light.

Viewer Prompt

If you have paint and are able to collect some sticks, try transforming them with different colors and patterns. Connect your colorful sticks with tape, glue, string or other material to create a sculpture.

Alexis Arnold | Silver Little Universe

In Little Universes, optical glass spheres are perfectly hugged by concrete pillows to play with material and perception. Hidden under the glass, and at times invisible, is a galaxy of color that can explode depending on light and viewing position. The spheres flip any background imagery viewed through them, illustrating what the viewers’ eyes see before their brains upright the images.

Viewer Prompt

With a marker, draw two arrows pointing in the same direction with one an inch or two below the other (keep the arrows short enough to fit behind a glass). Prop up your drawing and place a clear glass in front of the arrows and fill with water just above the first arrow to see what happens. Slide the glass in front of the arrows to further play with this refraction of light. After trying with arrows, try drawing different directional objects (hands, pets, people, plants, etc) and capture your refractions in short videos. Try drawing objects next to one another and pour water into a glass placed in front of one of the drawings to create an interaction between the objects. Here’s a video that illustrates this.

Fill a clear round glass (such as a wine glass) with water and hold it up to an object, person, or pet to see it flipped upside-down. Use the glass as a viewfinder to capture distorted pictures. You can add food coloring to the water to create colored filters. You can also play with color on paper behind the glass. Use a marker to draw a circle on a piece of paper, hold the glass filled with water to it, and move around to see the color fill the glass.

Agelio Batle | Black Mirror

I took a bit of delight “dismantling” this very fancy frame and then reconfiguring it in a way that made sense to me. The new shape seems to have lost some pomp in its contortions and gained a nervous bling. The contained, rectangular graphite fragments were determined by the position of the inside corners of the gold frame.

Viewer Prompt

Your challenge is to make a collage. Cut up an image of a very luxurious object and reconfigure it to be something different while maintaining visual coherence. Or the reverse: start with an image of a “poor” object and …

Pete Belkin | Bodie/Bodey

Shot on-location in Bodie, California, this film is a meditation on one of state’s most well-known ghost towns. It was once bustling as the third most-populated town in California. The town was named after Waterman Bodey, a prospector from New York who never actually saw his mining efforts in the area come to fruition. The town has been preserved in a state of arrested decay, maintained as a sort of outdoor museum by the state. Frozen in time, it faces the harsh weather and high altitude of the eastern Sierra. Inspired by man’s relationship to the land, natural resources as well as natural forces, this film is my experience of this place.

Viewer Prompt

Materials: scotch tape, scissors, magazines, paper, dry erase markers, fabric, translucent material.

Choose a window in your living space and make it a portal into another world. Create a collage that changes the landscape that you see out the window. Using materials you find around the house fill your window with new ideas and different lands. Create a composition which allows for light to still come in while transforming what you see outside!

Lauren Elder | R.I.P. A lament for recently extinct species

The idea for this project came to me during one of my frequent rambles in Oakland’s remarkable Mountain View Cemetery, a Victorian “fantasia” on death, complete with architectural monuments quoting from many world cultures. The cemetery was designed by the Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who also designed New York City’s Central Park and much of UC Berkeley and Stanford University.

It is an extraordinarily lovely environment that pays elaborate tribute to the passing of humans. Seeing the wildlife in the 226-acre urban park, it occurred to me that there are thousands of species that have already passed out of existence during the Anthropocene, many of whom have gone unnoticed or underreported. I feel that they also deserve to be memorialized. We should at least know their “names and faces.” Don’t you think?

I proposed the idea of a community art build to the activist group, Extinction Rebellion, and they embraced it enthusiastically. The idea is to carry the markers in street actions and strategically create instant cemeteries. We had completed two intensive sessions when the project skidded to a partial stop due to the current pandemic.

One of the volunteers, Verda Alexander, is a former art mentee and an enthusiastic artist working in this medium. Given the opportunity to participate in an online exhibition, we agreed to continue with several sample pieces – as well as sketches for future works. We are sharing those results with you now, as well as extending an invitation for you to participate.

Viewer Prompt

If you were going to design a grave marker, which creature would you choose? It can be an animal or a plant. The Red List gives a very up-to-date account to help you make a choice.

What style of monument would be fitting for the creature? Traditional? or something more imaginative? What is the story of the creature’s disappearance? This can be very fascinating research.

Do you want to make a drawing – or create a monument in papier-mâché? This project is easy to start at home with the delivery boxes you may be receiving currently, plus some wheat paste and ripped paper bags.

We hope you don’t find this creepy or too depressing but rather a heartfelt “song” to lost fellow travelers on the planet – and maybe you will be motivated to join one of many activist groups who are working very hard to save those species that are on the edge – among them orangutans, gorillas, rhinos, and the Mexican Vaquita, the world’s smallest porpoise.

Zoe Farmer | Sea Changes

Cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish and squid) seem to be flourishing in the oceans. Their numbers are increasing worldwide according to a 2016 study. Is the increase in cephalopods a good or a bad thing?

This piece is inspired by Gyaotaku (Japanese 魚拓, from gyo “fish” + taku “stone impression”), the traditional Japanese method of printing fish, a practice which dates back to the mid 1800s. This form of nature printing was used by fishermen to record their catch but has also become an art form of its own. Gyotaku is a Japanese method of printmaking that traditionally utilizes fish, sea creatures, or similar subjects as “printing plates” in its process. Prints were made using sumi ink and washi paper. It is rumored that samurai would settle fishing competitions using gyotaku prints. This original form of gyotaku, as a recording method for fisherman, is still utilized today, and can be seen hanging in tackle shops in Japan.

Viewer Prompt

Materials:
1. Paper.
2. Block printing ink is ideal, but paint will also work.
3. Small roller or paintbrush.
4. Real fish, shrimp, octopus or toy animals (ones made out of rubber or silicone are best. If you get serious about this project you can also purchase large silicone fish online).
5. Flat plastic sheet or surface to roll ink.

Method:
1. Prepare working space.
2. Roll a small amount of ink out onto the plastic sheet to ensure the roller is evenly covered in ink. Roll the ink onto the toy, fish/ plant/toy.
3. Place the inked object face down onto the paper. Press the object down to try and make contact between the inked object and the paper.
4. Carefully take the inked object off of the paper to reveal the print.
Repeat process if you want to make multiple images.

Renée Gertler | Lopud, Summer of 2007

This drawing is a blueprint for a sculpture yet to be made. My work draws on my experiences of working on a biodynamic farm, pollinating cherimoya trees, working at the Exploratorium in the life sciences department, and visiting derelict geodesic domes in Alaska. All of these places were formed with a sense of optimism during the countercultural movement in an effort to create a new paradigm. As a teen in the ’90s, my experiences of these places was almost like coming to the party too late, the aftermath of a dream. The drawings are an attempt to capture the imagined Technicolor dreamlike state of utopia and optimism.

Viewer Prompt

Draw a place that you have read about but never been to before, using color pencils and paper create a drawing that represents the three-dimensional qualities of that place as well as the emotional qualities it represents.

Taraneh Hemami | Witness, 1-9

A Project of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art on Market Street Kiosk Poster Series, funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

Viewer Prompt

Layering histories

1. Collect images researching past histories and everyday stories that you are interested in exploring. Research online, print them out on plain paper, cut them out. Research using newspapers or any printed matter such as magazines or books, cut out the images. You can also use family photographs from multiple generations to work with. Never cut the original. Make copies or scan and print them.

2. Select at least 2 images from your research. They could be of subjects that build a meaningful narrative together, either connected by history, or subject, location, relationship.

3. Print and cut the people out of each image or draw/trace selected images leaving the bodies hollow and their surroundings as simple line drawings or as elaborately painted in any media as you choose.

4. Experiment with layering the various combination of your cut-out images. Be open to the unexpected!

5. Photograph the new combination, experimenting with lighting and distance. Reprint. Tape the new collages.

6. Write a paragraph about what the new combinations reveal; how are they building on the narratives and complicating histories of people and place?

Abner Nolan | Rehearsal

These actors, members of the SFArtsED Players, were asked to (re)perform historically significant acceptance speeches from past Academy Awards broadcasts – speeches that were chosen specifically for their relationship to personal and political forms of protest.

Full video credit: Rehearsal, 2020. Jason Hanasik, camera and editing, with assistance from Oriyomi Origunwa.

Viewer Prompt

Find an impassioned speech by a person about some issue and learn it by heart, the words but also the way the speaker delivers the text, with their voice, their facial expressions, and their gestures. See what you find from doing that. Does it mean more? Do you think the speaker is being truthful? Make a video of your speech then look again at the speech you were referencing. What do you notice? Send both speeches to SFArtsED.

Richard Olsen | November 3 Is Garbage Day

The paintings are from my series Toons Are People Too. Here, I juxtaposed images that suggested some of the atrocities initiated by our president with President Taz himself in a garbage can. The piece was intended to have more examples of fear and abuse going up the wall of the gallery but was cut back for the photo given the limitations of my workspace.

Viewer Prompt

Make a drawing of something you like and hang it on the wall. Make a drawing of something you don’t like and crumble it up. Hang the crumbled paper next to the other drawing. Don’t they both look nice?

Erik Parra | Monster in the Mirror I & II

My works look to engage notions of self and cultural introspection or looking back to examine the contemporary. I like to play with the idea of reflection and the different ways of physically looking behind us. This diptych calls into question this idea of mirroring, which one is the real object, and which one is the reflection?

Viewer Prompt

What can you draw or paint to visually express ideas about reflection? Can you draw an object in your house, perhaps something that you use often that symbolizes the idea of looking back or looking behind?

SFArtsED Season 51 thanks their sponsors

Season Sponsors Host Committee
Catharine Clark Gallery | DIG Wine | Hugomento | MAC | Piccino | NOON all day | Recchiuti Confections