Flyer design by Crystal Dawana. Image by Albert Herter.
Slipper
September 22 - November 10, 2024
Featuring works by: David Bayus, Lemia Monet Bodden, Kari Cholnoky, Ximaps Dong, Erik Frydenborg, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Albert Herter, Catalina Ouyang, and Elina Vainio.
The exhibition includes three new commissions: a limited edition series of poem stickers by Claudia La Rocco, a book of drawings by Albert Herter with contributions by Joe Proulx and Jules Delisle, and the gallery’s rotating exterior sign space by Lemia Monet Bodden.
Opening Reception: Sunday September 22, 2-5pm
The opening includes a performance by Vallejo’s own abracadabra (dub duo), a presentation by V. Vale and Marian Wallace of the legendary Re/Search Publications, and beverages generously provided by Village.
Kari Cholnoky, Screaming Mimi, 2023. Acrylic, collage, wire, paper pulp 3 1/2h x 18 1/2w x 3d in. Image courtesy of Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.
Slipping between registers, like prophesy, some excessive field leaves deposits in our shared existence. It takes form, in the shape of slips of the tongue, or a slipped disc, articulated and yet still monstrous. The environment is overpopulated by tools and weapons that encode our lust or aggression into metal, plastic, or paper, infused with the unspeakable. Here is a collection of objects, of various media, that cannot be fully accounted for, that leave a remainder or lapsus, that aren’t completely discrete, and sit like cairns on a landscape, death’s representatives, recording trajectories between past and future. Marking the differences that matter, that can be utilized to situate oneself and guide a famished party. Small signs, like fragments of fossils, can refer to immensity. ~ Albert Herter
Slipper presents work by nine artists from the Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, and Helsinki. The exhibition includes three works as part of Personal Space’s ongoing New Works series: limited edition sticker poems by Claudia La Rocco, a book of drawings by Albert Herter, and the gallery’s rotating exterior sign space by Lemia Monet Bodden. The opening includes live music by Vallejo’s own abracadabra (dub duo), refreshments by Village, and a presentation by the legendary V. Vale and Marian Wallace of Re/Search Publications.
Don’t miss Inner Symbols, an exhibition curated by Lisa Núñez-Hancock, featuring artwork by Shawn “Beats” Grigsby, Debra Logan, Leslie Pascal, and Frank Gillett - artists working at the Arc-Solano in Vallejo. The exhibition is on view from September 22 - November 10, in the window of Village, a forthcoming gathering place next door to Personal Space (1503 Tennessee Street).
Catalina Ouyang, Arhat Ear #5, 2023. Soapstone. 4 x 3 x 1” Image courtesy of No Place Gallery.
Body Machines Chaotic Hopper
Claudia La Rocco
If you google the iconic SF punk band Flipper (an inappropriate but inevitable 2024 means of engagement with an iconic SF punk band you were too young to have seen when all the founders were still alive), one of the top results is a performance at Amoeba San Francisco on February 18, 2008. “The coalition for a drug-free America, brought to you by Pfizer,” an unctuous voice announces (cue knowing laughter). The black screen gives way: heads judder to Krist Novoselic’s irresistible bass riff, Bruce Loose yell-sings into the mic:
There are eyes that cannot see
And fingers that cannot touch
That’s the way of the world
There are dreams left empty and blank
And legs that have ceased to walk
That's the way of the world
There are kisses undelivered
Sighs and moans unuttered
That's the way of the world
There are hearts no longer beating
And there are entrails spilled on the floor
That’s the way of the world
Plus ça change. If the entrails had green netting to hold them, they might be more neatly contained. Since, you know, the flesh clearly failed. Art for end times that just keep on (never)ending. Whatever. I put on my sound-absorbing oversized hairy architectural jacket. (I who was one of three thousand.) I went out into the night or was it late afternoon my circuitry was fucked I was, I was—
archaeological
pseudo-mythological
technology
dreaming
CHAOTIC HOPPER
The scene was littered with dotted lines, tracing the trajectories of past and future flights and descents. I put my ear to the wall. Just, you know, just to see if I could hear (my ear had eyes). Already the present was disappearing into the sand. Something had been destroyed, was being destroyed, the body machine split open like a philosophy.
What it was, was, I’d been in the tar pits again. I couldn’t hold my horses, in part because they were hologram-like. Like, if white toe-ish organisms joined forces and thought to themselves, why couldn’t we be a horse? (We’ve all seen The Host. We know it’s coming for them while they’re busy coming for us.) Why not after all? I got depressed. I watched all of Fallout season one in two days, my ambitions dulled by old-timey music and choreographed disaster. Not good, exactly, but good enough.
You know what it was like? It was like legible data that had undergone some fundamental transformation — a kind of deep dreaming, or death, or encryption — and then reemerged in the form of a resistant Delphian artifact. In other words. Euphoria, if only you can get over your juvenile attachment to your body.
Just now, for example, I’m thinking about archaeology. This happens when the surface gets all grimy, accumulation duking it out with erosion. You have to wait for the wind to clean the sand. Desert power. Form pressed against form. I wonder how many of those bodies in that video are still in the Bay Area. How much longer Amoeba will stick it out, with or without the weed sales. Here’s to changeable creatures; you know, at a certain point, it’s all, like, research, man. The glass is cool against your foot. Everything is hand carved. The soft parts move, even (especially) when you don’t want them to.
*
With some text absorbed, abstracted, and/or abused from conversations with Lisa Rybovich Crallé; “The scene was littered with dotted lines, tracing the trajectories of past and future flights and descents,” is from Albet Herter, “One cannot have one's own house”; “…legible data that had undergone some fundamental transformation — a kind of deep dreaming, or death, or encryption — and then reemerged in the form of a resistant Delphian artifact” is from Erik Frydenborg.
Flyer design by Crystal Dawana. Image by Albert Herter.
Limited Edition stickers by Claudia La Rocco. Commissioned by Personal Space for Slipper, 2024.
Dvid Bayus, video still from Sessions 1 & 2, 2016-17 (27:35 min)
Albert Herter, Instauration #6, 2015. Ink on paper. 12 3/4 x 15 3/4” framed
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Sound Blanket No. 10, 2022. Hand-felted wool, human hair, and synthetic hair with satin lining and steel hardware. 62 × 55 × 11”. Images courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery.