Images courtesy of Brianna Tadeo. Flyer design by Crystal Dawana. Typeface is Basteleur by Keussel, distributed by velvetyne.fr. 

Quark!

March 10 - April 28, 2024

Opening Reception: Sunday March 10, 2-5pm

Beverages & music generously provided by Village

Curated by J Rivera Pansa

Featuring works by: Paige Raina Davis, Miller Robinson, Brianna Tadeo, and agustine zegers.

Personal Space is pleased to present our fourth exhibition, curated by J Rivera Pansa. Quark! gathers the work of Paige Raina Davis, Miller Robinson, Brianna Tadeo, and agustine zegers. These adaptive offerings permeate between the act of process, non-anthropocentric sensibility, and object-sensorial modalities. Ranging from lineal meditations, olfactory experience, and markers of locale through time and environment, Quark! builds from the fundamental materials the artists diffuse to yield introspective matters of photography, scent, and sculpture.

Our New Works series includes:

• New work by Paige Raina Davis for the gallery’s exterior sign space

• A printed broadside of Matthew Gordon’s poetry from the series What. Printed by Jessalyn Aaland / Current Editions.

• A screening of The Blue Description Project (BDP), an audio description and captioning project that engages Derek Jarman's Blue (1993) via expanded and critical accessibility. BDP will be screened at Winslow House Project on Saturday April 6th, 8pm. Check here for more details. All proceeds benefit the Solano AIDS Coalition . 

Paige Raina Davis, October's I-Ching, 2024. Porcelain, thread. 1/4’' x 30’ x 30''  Photo credit: Jordan Benton 

About the Curator

J Rivera Pansa (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Huichin Ohlone Land, Oakland, CA. Their work incorporates sculpture, text, and performance as an expansive "grid" field tethering form and reflections on humanistic systems regarding modular seriality and contemporary capital structures. Rivera Pansa completed their BA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley and has shown work at Pied-à-terre (San Francisco, CA), Nook Gallery (Oakland, CA), / (Slash) Art (San Francisco, CA), Best Western Gallery (Santa Fe, NM), NIAD Art Center (Richmond, CA), Lane Meyer Projects (Denver, CO), BAMPFA (Berkeley, CA) among others.

New Works

Paige Raina Davis
Hexagram 11 Diptych, 2024
Nylon, beeswaxed cotton, thread, cord
Approximately 30 x 48”

Matthew Gordon poetry broadside (verso). Commissioned by Personal Space, 2024. Risograph print by Jessalyn Aaland / Current Editions.

I’ve always had difficulty hearing and I did not get my first pair of hearing aids until I was 21. Prior to that, I often had to guess at what was being said in most situations, or try to fill in the gaps by the surrounding context. This unpacking and filling in has become one of my primary strategies as a poet. 

The poems in What seek to literalize and pun on ideas put forth by the poet Jack Spicer, who described his poems as being dictated from the Outside. Spicer positioned the poet in the role of scribe, seeking to record these transmissions rather than generate from within themselves.

The What poems, then, are occasioned by going to readings given by fellow poets. When I attend a reading, if I am unsure of what was said, I write down what I think I heard. At the reading’s conclusion I have a list of lines that may or may not be accurate. These lines are then rearranged into new poems. As Spicer once said, “Words are things which just happen to be in your head instead of someone else’s head.”

Matthew Gordon is a poet and artist based in the Washington DC area. By day he currently manages the helpdesk at George Washington University. His work has been published in numerous publications including Mirage #4/Period(ical) and the plaid review. He has been exhibited at Southern Exposure, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery and other venues. http://nodrogttam.com/

Saturday April 6, 2024 ~ 8pm

Blue Description Project screening at Winslow House, Vallejo

Suggested donation $10

All proceeds benefit the Solano AIDS Coalition

No one turned away for lack of funds

https://www.winslowhouseproject.org/vallejo/film-screening-april-6

The Blue Description Project (BDP) is an audio description and captioning project—produced by Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts in collaboration with Voices in the Gallery— that engages Derek Jarman's Blue (1993) via expanded and critical accessibility. As Jarman wrote in Chroma (1994): “if I have overlooked something you hold precious—write it in the margin.” BDP takes up this invitation by creating a new, experimental iteration of Blue on the 30th anniversary of its release and Jarman’s death. The BDP iteration features creative captions and audio description that have been sourced from numerous contributors. It attempts to convey, express, engage, respond, evoke, articulate, replicate, translate, transmogrify, channel, and transcend what blue is/was/could be....

In 1993, the British artist Derek Jarman released Blue, an epoch-defining account of AIDS, illness, and the experience of disability in a culture of repressive heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. Despite being referred to as a feature film, Blue never existed exclusively in one medium. It was screened in theaters, simulcast on television and radio, released as a CD, and published as a book, creating opportunities for many different kinds of sensory abilities—visual, aural, and textual—to experience the work. The Blue Description Project, conceived by artists and writers Christopher Jones, Liza Sylvestre and Sarah Hayden builds on the multifaceted nature of Jarman’s work through newly commissioned and expansive accessibility. Reflecting Blue’s standing as a foundational work of Crip art, the project challenges ableist hierarchies in art while focusing on the generative possibilities of difference and interdependence. 

Written transcript of BDP : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1twOuTCVqXYyvaQ2ZA3DI10BWl5v17vNs/view

BDP crowd source: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeJ-BFXNpTuDJQKfsTeUXMkcD5Z_5rsp0jEW6UPEh3RrSCc9w/viewform

Paige Raina Davis is a multidisciplinary artist, currently living in the East Bay and working on a vegetable farm. She follows threads stemming from dailiness, researching connections and convergences that arise, investigating what it means to be American and live in the U.S. She often finds recurring patterns, shapes, or materials project to project, allowing the shape—a yellow ball, an open circle, a wavy line—to take on the meaning of a thought process, theory, or amulet.

Miller Robinson (it/its/itself) is a trans, gender non-confirming, two-spirit, avansahíichva transdisciplinary Karuk/Yurok artist based in Tongva/Gabrieleno Territory (Los Angeles, CA). Since receiving a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2014 Miller has exhibited widely in LA including at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Craft Contemporary, Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and Heritage Square Museum. Miller was a fellow of the 2023 Queer|Art Mentorship program as well as a recipient of the 2022 Los Angeles Artadia Award.

Tethered by sensibilities that prioritize collaboration, storytelling and the evolution of non-linear timelines– themes of animacy, transmutation, temporality, and care are routine to the practice. It works in constant dialogue with the state of materials and experiences, informed by other-than-human relations, the history of craft, and the study of karuk linguistics to bridge intersections of personhood and language evolution. Through performance, sculpture, and installation, it incorporates garment-making, poetry, tattooing, and books to create detailed ecosystems within exhibitions that seek out horizons in Queer and Trans potentialities.

Brianna Tadeo found their way into a darkroom at the age of 12 and has been smitten with photography ever since. They have a love of tinkering with old cameras and making use of discarded photographic materials. They were born in Philadelphia, PA, and received their BFA from California College of the Arts in 2014. They are currently pursuing an MFA in studio arts at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. They are a visual artist whose work focuses on using photographic materials to show the effects of time, mortality, and decay. They have shown their work at Harwood Art Center, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, AIPAD in NYC, Gallery 1/1, and Art Intersection. Their work has been featured in SOVO// Magazine, One Twelve Publishing issue Diffusion IX, The Hand Magazine, and Group Study.

agustine zegers is a Chilean olfactory artist and writer. Their work studies molecular biopolitics and anthropocene atmospherics, attending to the complex nodes of interdependence we share as inhabitants of Earth. By way of queer and microbial methodologies, zegers deploys care practices that reach microscopic dimensions by incorporating bacterial communities, aromatic molecules, and food absorption in their artistic projects, creating tools to reflect about ecocide, interspecies and intrahuman belonging, and care itself. Their work has been exhibited and published internationally at venues such as the Venice Biennale, Galería Jaqueline Martins, Sharjah Art Foundation, Olfactory Art Keller, and DIS Magazine.

J Rivera Pansa (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Huichin Ohlone Land, Oakland, CA. Their work incorporates sculpture, text, and performance as an expansive "grid" field tethering form and reflections on humanistic systems regarding modular seriality and contemporary capital structures. Rivera Pansa completed their BA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley and has shown work at Pied-à-terre (San Francisco, CA), Nook Gallery (Oakland, CA), / (Slash) Art (San Francisco, CA), Best Western Gallery (Santa Fe, NM), NIAD Art Center (Richmond, CA), Lane Meyer Projects (Denver, CO), BAMPFA (Berkeley, CA) among others.

Derek Jarman being canonized by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, 1991. Image credit: Denis Doran