The Lab is a nonprofit experimental art and performance space located in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Aine Nakamura’s hands on tape encompasses a year-long research project at The Lab, taking shape as an installation and series of performances throughout June and July. The work points to disparate subjects of the raw silk trade, the erased labor of both women and silkworms, and the metamorphosis of bodies and materials. Nakamura draws a connection between the city of San Francisco (“mulberry port,” as written with Chinese characters) and her maternal family’s city of Hachioji, Japan (“mulberry city”), shortly before her family’s historical home was sold and left the family. Drawing on her longstanding practice of embodied performance, Nakamura takes on the role of an oni, with a devil mask, as a guardian of her family’s historical home in Hachioji, with photographic documentation threaded through the installation, while further drawing connections between bodies and buildings—a process of healing and release.
Over the course of three years, interdisciplinary artist and researcher Carrie Hott investigated The Lab’s digital infrastructure, asking the question: “What would a truly sustainable web look like?” Our Shiver takes form as a solar-powered web server installed on-site at The Lab and accessible online. In addition to the results of Hott’s research and building process, the project includes commissioned essays from Chia Amisola, Jacob Kahn, Megan Prelinger, Andrea Steves, and Xiaowei Wang, with technical contributions by Abram Stern (aphid). The project will also be published in risograph book format, designed by Chris Hamamoto and printed by Colpa Press.
arcane transmissions seeks to collapse the interior-exterior site of The Lab’s Redstone Building through the production of a collection of low-frequency radio transmitters and receivers as sculptures that transform pyrite (the technical term for “fool’s gold”) into channels for community engagement and communication.
Renowned Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz’s Behemoth II (2024) (co-commissioned by KADIST and San Francisco Art Fair) is an inflatable sculpture mimicking the form of the Ulysses S. Grant statue in Golden Gate Park that was toppled in 2020. The sculpture invokes recent global movements to “redact” controversial, colonialist monuments by shrouding them in black tarps. The work is also juxtaposed with sound artist Asha Sheshadri’s video Portmanteau (2021), which takes the form of a virtual museum tour set in empty pandemic-era museums, focusing on the looted objects they housed. Set to a distorted soundtrack that recalls the sonic impact of the toppled monuments, Behemoth II cycles through “inflated” and “deflated” sounds. The commission returns to San Francisco after presentations at the San Francisco Art Fair, Seattle Art Fair, and the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston in 2024.
July 8–July 29, 2023
Opening Reception: July 8, 5:00–7:00pm
Gallery Hours: Thursday–Saturday, Noon–5:00pm
Tickets: Free
Released in 1990, The Cure's Pictures of You brims with nostalgia, heartache, destruction, and desire. While this exhibition of work by Headlands' 2022–23 Graduate Fellows pays homage to the goth-pop anthem, the song also serves as a potent metaphor: expressing the uncanny experience of loss and the human impulse to meticulously create an idea of a person, place, or thing to endeavor to fill a gaping emotional void. No matter how well crafted, these melancholy “pictures” become powerful, yet superficial surrogates composed through ghostly traces (recollections, fragments of desires, regrets, and dreams). The artists featured in this exhibition make works that invoke a sense of impermanence, speculation, spirituality, transformation, alchemy, myth, and history by assembling fragments to create metaphorical reliquaries.
Bonnie Banks, ubiquitous and elusive, has expanded the auspices of visual and sonic art for over two decades. Determinedly detailed, Banks’ paintings and drawings range in size from a playing card to a theater-filling backdrop. Some are shocking in their copious, rainbow-bomb-color, others in brutal, futuristic, black-and-white. All capture the viewer in a scene just this side of placeable, where your eyes can likely find what they want to—a city built from recycled stereo components, an ancient vessel teetering over rapids, a schema for future machines, a glistening new species. – Maureen P. Klier
Sadie Barnette’s newest installation reimagines her father’s bar – the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. From 1990-93 Rodney Barnette operated the New Eagle Creek Saloon, a family-run business which served a multiracial gay community marginalized by the racist profiling practices of San Francisco’s bar scene at that time.
Earthworks, created in 2016, is a five-channel computer generated animation, which creates an immersive experience of the phenomena of landscape formation through the scientific and technological devices that are used to study it. Masses of colorful layers are animated by the soundscapes of earthquake, volcanic, glacial and human activity, recorded as seismic waves, which form spectacular fluctuating marbled waveforms.
The Italian artist Norma Jeane worked with CODAME to design a robot that they subsequently liberated in Palm Desert. This robot has no function in the traditional sense. It does not serve us; it probably will not enslave us (perhaps only our imagination). Instead, this robot is programmed to run. To run immediately, with nervous electric heartbeat, in the opposite direction as soon as it senses the presence of a human being.
The Hearing Voices Lab is a residency project at The Lab by Spanish artist Dora García and Oslo Academy based artists Oda Skaathun, Eva Rosa Hollup Roald, Miriam Myrstad, Agnieszka Golaszewska, Peter Horneland, Mor Efrony and Sofie Amalie Andersen. The Hearing Voices Lab draws on the ambiguities of the idea of hearing voices – considering that this is something that is done constantly while we exist in public, but as it also describes the phenomenon of hearing inner voices.
Over the course of October 2016, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (formerly Jacqueline Gordon) created Inside You Is Me, a dynamic sculpture with moveable walls, a multichannel sound piece, and staged performances. Local artists Maryanna Lachman, Jose Abad, Oscar Tidd, and Sam Hertz were joined by Los Angeles composers FAY and Jonathan Mandabach, and New York dancers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener. The eight artists used Gork’s installation as a system in which to create new sonic and visual compositions.
Fritzia Irízar presents her recent film, White Chameleon/HFCS, accompanied live by the low tones of a bassoon player. White Chameleon/HFCS is a continuation of Irízar’s work on the psychological, economic, and symbolic conditions of value, and how industries—in this case the machinations of the sugar industry—invest heavily in fictions and sleights-of-hand to downplay the life-threatening realities of their product. Following this performance, White Chameleon/HFCS will be on view through August 20.
A Journal of the Plague Year was first shown at Para Site, Hong Kong during the summer of 2013. Conceived as a touring exhibition, its center of gravity shifts under the influence of magnetic forces in each location on its itinerary. Nevertheless, each iteration departs from and remains strongly connected to an exploration of the events that affected Hong Kong in the spring of 2003: the most significant airborne epidemic in recent years–the SARS crisis–coupled with the tragic death of pop figure and pan-Asian icon Leslie Cheung.
This multivenue exhibition both celebrates and aims to reinvigorate the spirit of Terry Fox (1943–2008), whose importance as a first-generation San Francisco Bay Area Conceptual artist cannot be exaggerated. For much of the 1970s Fox lived in San Francisco and was an integral part of the art activities that centered on Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art. Like other like-minded artists nationally and internationally, Fox and his contemporaries—Howard Fried, David Ireland, Paul Kos, Linda Montano, Bonnie Sherk, and Marioni—abandoned the production of static art objects in favor of process works, video, installation, and performance. This unique project, curated by Dena Beard and Constance Lewallen, features a limited-edition catalog in the form of a box containing texts, recordings, and ephemera.