Author: Justin Hoover
The Book: Exhibition & Performance Series
What: The Book – a multimedia, installation-performance
Who: Avy K Productions/Erika Tsimbrovsky & Vadim Puyandaev (Commons Curatorial Residency Recipient 2010/2011)
Free Opening Reception and Performance: July 1, 6:00 – 9:00PM featuring dance installations by Avy K Productions and guest artist Carol Swann
Ticketed Installation-performances with guest artists:
- July 7 with Ken Ueno and Matt Ingalls, mingle with artists 7:30 – 8:00PM , performance 8:00 – 9:00PM
- July 14 with Jesse Hewit, PC Muñoz, and Tommy Shepherd, mingle with artists 7:30 – 8:00PM , performance 8:00 – 9:00PM
- July 21 with Jeffrey Alphonsus Mooney and Philip Huang, mingle with artists 7:30 – 8:00PM , performance 8:00 – 9:00PM
Free Closing Reception & Performance: July 29, reception 6:00 – 9:00PM, featuring dance installations by Avy K Productions
Exhibition Dates: July 1 through 29, 2011
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Friday 12:00 – 7:00 pm, Saturday 12:00 – 5:00 pm
Where: SOMArts Main Gallery (934 Brannan Street, between 8th and 9th)
SOMArts Cultural Center presents The Book, a multidimensional, multimedia installation and the the first Commons Curatorial Residency of the 2011-2012 season. The Book, an installation-performance based in experimental non-theater dance that allows the viewer to freely move within the work and willingly participate during, before, after and between performances, addresses the investigative process of a meditation on the inner world of the artist and the artist’s relationship with a rational society and a technological age.
In The Book artists and audience members allow their personal stories to enter the performance space, creating a collective public diary. The Book is a kaleidoscope of sketches, snippets of thought, debris of feelings, traces of movement, and echoes of sounds that were once heard.
Each performance is a random page from The Book, and each invites a different guest artist to enter the structure, created by Avy K and collaborators, in order to destroy it and give it new life. Guest artists include: Jesse Hewit, Philip Huang, Jeffrey Alphonsus Mooney, PC Muñoz, Tommy Shepherd, Carol Swann, and Ken Ueno with Matt Ingalls, along with Avk K collaborators/performers: Aleksey Bochkovsky, Daniel Bear Davis, Sean Feit, Izmail Galin, Kristen Greco, Grundik Kasyansky, Kristina Kirshner, Vitali Kononov, Lucas Krech, Rob Kunkle, Mihyun Lee, Justin Morrison, Daisy Phillips, Vadim Puyandaev, Erika Tsimbrovsky, Ronja Ver, Andrew Ward, Paul Clipson, Andrew Way and Elena Zhukova.
The Book and Avy K Productions is one of four recipients of a 2011-12 Commons Curatorial Residency at SOMArts. Selected artists and curators receive funding support and access to one of the largest and most beautiful gallery spaces in the heart of the city in order to expand their practice, engage the Bay Area’s many cultural communities, and turn vision into reality. Avy K Productions was awarded the SOMArts Commons Curatorial Residency for July, 2011.
Advance tickets the The Book performances can be purchased here.
About Avy K Productions
Founded by long-time collaborators Erika Tsimbrovsky (choreographer/performer) and Vadim Puyandaev (visual artist/performer), Avy K Productions brings together artists of different media to create improvisational multidisciplinary performances involving contemporary dance, live painting, evolving installation, video projection, and live music. Avy K employs improvisation to unite different artists under a common idea and to achieve real communication among media, as opposed to one medium serving another. Avy K’s work has strong visual elements—sets and costumes take on a life of their own, breathing and dancing with the performers as the space evolves, and aesthetic principles from painting composition are used in developing movement codes. Avy K uses the principles of visual art but the tools of physical movement and improvisation; Avy K can be described as an experimental visual non/theater of dance. Avy K premiered their work in the Bay Area with The Garden (2007) at NOHspace, San Francisco, and Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University, followed by Scrap-Soup (2008) and Nocturnal Butterflies (2009), at Theater Artaud, San Francisco. More information on Avy K can be found at www.avyk.org.
Erika Tsimbrovsky (Choreographer/performer) is an innovator in the field of improvised dance performance. Born in Kazakhstan, she studied modern and contemporary dance in Belarus, Moscow, and Amsterdam. In Israel, where she lived for twelve years, she co-founded the award-winning experimental performance group EVM Laboratories to research the interaction between diverse media structures and to develop specific improvisational performance techniques. Avy K Productions is the San Francisco-based incarnation of her and visual artist Vadim Puyandaev’s 16-year collaboration.
Vadim Puyandaev (Visual artist/performer) has worked as a painter, sculptor, and designer for over twenty years and has been participating in multi-media dance performances since 1998. His fine art has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Russia, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, France, Spain, Canada, and the US. Puyandaev has also produced numerous pieces of monumental art, including a commission to design a bridge over the Red Sea as well as to design a sculpture ensemble for the entrance to the city of Eilat in Israel. With Tsimbrovsky, he is a founding member of the creative collectives EVM Laboratories (Israel) and Avy K Productions (US), dedicated to investigating what emerges in performance at the nexus of different genres. http://www.puyandaev.net
QIY: Queer It Yourself – Tools for Survival
What: QIY: Queer It Yourself —Tools for Survival
Opening Reception: Saturday June 4, 1–5pm
Exhibition Dates: June 4–24, 2011
Where: SOMArts Main Gallery, 934 Brannan Street (between 8th and 9th)
What Else: Free admission. More information at http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/
QIY: Queer It Yourself – Tools for Survival
Inspired by the late 1960s utopian builders’ guide A Whole Earth Catalog, QIY: Queer It Yourself – Tools for Survival presents a forum for queer do-it-yourself culture and alternative world making.
QIY is envisioned as a laboratory for creating a sustainable queer culture and demonstrating the power of self and community organizing, re-creation, speculation, and transformation. As an antidote to anti-sociality theories of queerness (that suggest queerness can only be rendered as a negation of heteronormativity), Queer It Yourself invites artists to forge their own tools for surviving the everyday challenges of contemporary queer existence.
The exhibition is built around artists’ workstations, participatory spaces, hands-on training sites, maps, and user-friendly art that uses immersive and interactive experiences to demonstrate the idea of art as a tool, as having active agency within the totality of a meaningful lived world.
The QIY curators have queered the index of the original “Whole Earth Catalog” and adapted its thoughtful and useful categories to frame our own QIY space.
The Ramp Features Transit/Stasis
What: TRANSIT/STASIS: Negotiating Movement in the City
Who: San Francisco Art Institute MA Collaborative 2011
Installation Dates: May 1 – May 15, 2011
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Friday 12:00 – 7:00 pm, Saturday 12:00 – 5:00 pm
Where: SOMArts Ramp Gallery (934 Brannan Street, between 8th and 9th)
Portraiture by Maga Rincon, April 15–30
What: Portraiture by Maga Rincon
Exhibition Dates: April 15–30, 2011
Where: SOMArts Ramp Gallery
The work of local artist Maga Rincon touches on many interesting themes, including self-identity as well as the relationship one has to one’s subconscious. Her work’s vibrant colors draw in the viewer and hold the eye with their vibrations.
According to Rincon, symbolically, one aspect that is present throughout these works is an elongated neck as, referencing slender lines of contemporary beauty. Moreover, these elongations reference the neck as the locus of the fifth chakra, the human creativity center.
Also, check out the video link to youtube, where you can watch Maga speak about the work of Andres Heinsen, the previous exhibiting artist at The Ramp Gallery.
Low Lives 3: Global Performance Festival Apr 30
What: Low Lives 3 – Performance festival featuring Juan Luna Avin and Julio Cesar Morales
When: Saturday April 30, 12 noon – 3:00 pm, doors open at 11:30 am
Where: SOMArts Cultural Center (934 Brannan St. @8th)
Cost: Recommended $5 donation, but no one turned away for lack of funds
Now entering its third year, Low Lives, an international exhibition of live performance-based works transmitted via the internet and projected in real time at multiple venues throughout the U.S. and around the world will be coming live to SOMArts Cultural Center. Produced and curated by Jorge Rojas, Low Lives examines works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of performance practice presented live through online broadcasting networks. This year Low Lives promises to be the farthest reaching to date with twenty two presenting partners in the United States, Mexico, Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, Germany, India, Tanzania, and Japan.
The live performance by Avin and Morales will begin at 12:36 PM. (more…)
Earth Day Weekend: Garden Beautification Day
What: Earth Day Weekend Celebration: Garden Beautification Day
When: Saturday April 23, 2011 from 11:00am–4:00pm
Where: SOMArts Cultural Center (934 Brannan @8th)
Cost: FREE!
Following Earth Day this Friday April 22nd, we are eager to tackle the winter growth in our garden and patio. Join us for a fun afternoon of digging in the dirt, pulling out the weeds and getting the garden ready for all of the great events coming up this spring and summer. All volunteers are welcome.
We will develop a work plan with Amber Hasselbring of Mission Greenbelt Project, our official garden guru and artist extraordinaire. In fact, recently Amber was selected as one of the artists for the Art on Market Street. project with the Arts Commission so it is great to welcome her artistic vision (and naturalist vision) back to the garden at SOMArts.
We will have the tasks and the tools ready and we will serve up drinks and refreshments to keep the troops happy. Come and join us – when you are enjoying a nosh in the garden this summer during an event, you will thank yourself and we will thank you, too. For more information or to RSVP, email volunteer@somarts.org or phone 415-863-1414, x111.
Spread Closing Reception, Apr 27
What: Spread Artist Closing Reception
When: Wednesday, April 27 5–-7pm
Where: SOMArts Cultural Center (934 Brannan @8th)
Cost: FREE!
To bring the exhibition Spread: California Conceptualism Then and Now, to full completion, we are wrapping up the show with a final reception. Come by for a last minute game of pétanque with the gallery curators and artists and enjoy this spectacular exhibit one last time! There are free artist made cards for the taking by Carissa Potter, interactive games by Paul Kos, interactive video installations and many wonderful video artworks.
Spread is a large scale participatory and interactive exhibition featuring five pairs of Bay Area based conceptual or new media artists based in California working across a wide spectrum of media including sound installation, sculpture, photography and even giant plastic balloons. It is one of final Commons Curatorial Residency recipients for the 2010/2011 season.
From the establishment of the Museum of Conceptual Art and The Farm in the 1970’s to the ongoing influence of public and private arts education programs, San Francisco has been home to innovators, rule breakers and unsung heroes. Practices as diverse as conceptual art, relational aesthetics, web, sound and interactive art would be but pale shadows of themselves without the rigorous, energetic contributions of pioneering artists like Sharon Grace, Paul Kos, Tony Labat, George Legrady and Laetitia Sonami. Along with their far ranging personal visions, these individuals have mentored and guided generations of young artists from around the world; Carissa Potter, Julien Berthier, Guy Overfelt, Angus Forbes and Jaqueline Gordon, all emerging or mid-career artists of formidable talent, represent a select handful who have spent time under the tutelage of those vanguard artists with telling effect.2
SPREAD: Artist Panel Discussion
What: Spread Artist Panel Discussion Moderated by Kathrine Worel
When: Thursday April 14 6-8pm
Where: SOMArts Cultural Center (934 Brannan @8th)
Cost: FREE!
To expand the fun of the exhibition Spread: California Conceptualism Then and Now, a new month-long exhibition curated by OFF Space, SOMArts is hosting an artist panel discussion tonight. This evening at SOMArts artists Jacqueline Gordon, Sharon Grace, Tony Labat, George Legrady, Guy Overfelt and Carissa Potter will discuss their work, California-centric Conceptual Art and lots more —please join us with your questions, insights and comments!
Spread is a large scale participatory and interactive exhibition featuring five pairs of Bay Area based conceptual or new media artists based in California working across a wide spectrum of media including sound installation, sculpture, photography and even giant plastic balloons. It is one of final Commons Curatorial Residency recipients for the 2010/2011 season. (more…)
