Tension and Transformation on Valencia Street
As stARTup awakens from a 2 year pandemic-enforced hiatus, we’re relaunching our blog with a guest column by artist, Todd Larson. Todd recently ventured out to San Francisco’s Incline Gallery to take in their latest exhibition, In Tension. Like stARTup, our home city of San Francisco is again alive with museum and gallery shows, art fairs, pop-ups, perfomances, and myriad other cultural events. Stay tuned for more news about stARTup.
Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District has been bustling of late, with portions of 16th - 21st streets closed to motorized traffic Thursday through Sunday. The vibrant mix of restaurants, buskers and art galleries has been drawing audiences that are eager to forget their pandemic blues.
One such venue is Incline Gallery, between 18th and 19th streets, which has been exhibiting cutting edge work since 2010. This former mortuary is one of the more architecturally unique galleries in the Bay Area, with its winding ramp(formerly used to shuttle coffins upstairs for embalming) climbing two stories to a small sky-lit atrium space. Artists Becca Barolli, Bronwyn Dexter, Laura Van Duren and Leah Virsik took full advantage of the space with their recent group exhibition In Tension, on view February 5 - March 12.
In their collective artist statement for the show, the four Bay Area artists were interested in exploring themes of tension, including its inherent references to stress and anxiety, but also the positive aspects of physical forces that prevent collapse and provide support. Each artist explores these sometimes oppositional forces through different lenses of material, metaphor, process and form.
Becca Barolli blends traditional craft techniques such as weaving and knitting with industrial wire. In her work “To the Core”, concentric circles, squiggles and lines spiral to create circles of confusion, with macro and micro levels of resolve. “All Tied Up in Knots” has the appearance of fabric, as in a throw rug or blanket. From a distance, her works appear to be 3-dimensional drawings in graphite, however, the lighting changes their shape in moire like patterns as you approach and recede. The forms are at once familiar and foreign. At first glance the repetition of shape and connection has a calming effect. As you move in relation to the work, the light plays tricks with your sense of depth perception and motion, which combined with the material, can be unsettling.
On left: Becca Barolli, ‘To The Core’, steel wire. Right: Bronwyn Dexter, ‘Archive of the Unresolved’, fabric and dye
“Archive of the Unresolved”, Bronwyn Dexter’s time based installation of draped stained white fabric pulled up into a cone of tension that is joined to a sea of dark fabric stalactite forms that hang over the scene. On first viewing, the work has a certain serenity, tucked in a corner, apart from the other work. If you stand there for a moment you will begin to notice that the stalactite-like dark forms above are dripping onto the white base creating wide stains that resemble the color of bruised skin.This is the inherent dynamic of the piece, always shifting and morphing as the liquid stains and takes over the once blank canvas.
Laura Van Duren’s work blends materials such as ceramics, wood and cast glycerine soap to invoke themes of decay, resiliency, perseverance and adaptation. “Mouthful” has the size and shape of a traditional bust on pedestal work, but that is where the similarities end. A bulbous volume of magenta glycerine (wrapped in clear vinyl, which accentuates its candy-like qualities) emerges from a finely crafted, abstract ceramic vessel. The effect is of dignity holding on, even in the face of atrophy and challenge. Van Duren’s “Anatomy of Connection” is an alcove installation that fills the space with a crumpled collaged skin of pink and orange Bureau of Land Management maps. There are three rectangular sliced open holes, each glowing with hot pink LED lights. On close inspection of the holes you find the inner bones of the piece that look like rectangular ceramic landscapes of color and glycerin. The artist gives attention to the adjacency of Native American nations, military training and arsenal test sites. Their proximity lends a sense of unease that contradicts the calming pastel palette of the maps.
On left: Laura Van Duren, ‘Mouthful’, glycerin soap, ceramic. Right: Lean Virsik, ‘Apart at the Seams’ recycled denim fabric
In “Apart at the Seams”, artist Leah Virsik engages directly with Incline Gallery’s architecture, covering the open space between the banisters of the winding ramp with intricately cut lengths of recycled denim, creating a playful, almost tent-like space. I’m reminded of playing under blanket draped furniture as a child, creating hidden spaces, and peering through openings to the sometimes tension filled real world. As in Becca Barolli’s pieces, lighting is essential to the experience, with shadow and shape changing as one views the work from varying angles.
In-Tension invites the view to pay close attention to details, in material, form and adjacency. In experiencing the exhibition in total, you notice the care given to the relational aspects of the work and how they play off each other. The effect is of a unified group of artists working together, critiquing and supporting each other in their similar, and disparate aesthetics. The structures they create reference the body, systems and interconnection, and how we adapt to the shifting tensions of our internal and external experience, with both anticipation and anxiety. I look forward to seeing what they do next.