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| Lost in Space |
| Stephan Pascher |
| Saturday, March 12, 6-8 pm - Apr 2, 2011 |
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Four artists shine flairs into the non-space that connects Hollywood, history, home and the ubiquitous commodity. Stephan Pascher, who splits his time between New York City and Marfa, Texas, often uses artistic models from the 60s and 70s to explore contemporary concepts and situations. His sculpture spelling out John Wayne is based on Robert Smithson's non-site sculptures, in which Smithson filled boxes with rocks and debris from far off locations that were somehow meaningful to him, creating a dialogue between the inside of the gallery and the far away space. Pascher's sculpture, which inspired Lost in Space, complicates our experience of presence, landscape, location and even our own sense of agency, by depositing us somewhere between a man, a myth, a performance and a panoply of outdoor stage sets otherwise known as the west. Lisa Blatt is a San Francisco artist and media lawyer whose photography and conceptual projects have frequently placed her in physical peril. To make the photographs in this show, however, Blatt merely had to scrutinize the videos of Lady Gaga for products that had been placed in them. She then acquired those products and destroyed them in a private performance during her residency at the Djerassi Foundation. The photos document the shards and debris as they reflect and refract the light. The sheer volume of cultural production from Chris Sollars, a San Francisco-based artist, gallerist and filmmaker, is enough to make any normal person search for a stronger brand of coffee. In a 300-plus image slide show, Sollars documents some of the site-specific sculptures he has made on the streets in the Mission, both the location of his home/studio/gallery, and of Steven Wolf Fine Arts. Like a peripatetic philosopher, Sollars thinks on his feet, grabbing at whatever flotsam and jetsam emerge to make a sculpture that is in the neighborhood, of the neighborhood, and for the neighborhood. Rebecca Ora's work explores the range of human emotion located between humor and discomfort. Poking ethical nerves through exploring vexing situations, her videos bring to the fore questions of spectatorship and voyeurism; power and exploitation; and marginality and belonging, all the while implicating both the artist and the audience in a quagmire of problems. In Ora's new film, shot when she was still a student at CCA, the artist canvases the Haight where she works, offering street people money to perform a ridiculous walk. By focusing on this historic neighborhood's street kids, who are living a bathetic version of a hippie dream that curdled long ago, Ora cuts through the liberal queasiness about poverty and homelessness in a way that 2000 hours of Fox news never could.
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