Past Performances and special projects

We are currently seeking proposals for engaging projects during the fair in the common spaces of the hotel. Contact us here.

Guta Galli
brid(g)e II

brid(g)e was originally performed at Root Division in San Francisco.  In that piece, a female figure dressed as a bride crawled along Market Street to reach a gallery event. In the second version the artist will perform different aspects of the same theme: the marriage between immigration politics and art.

Both pieces are about the death of the romantic ideas behind being an artist, especially one that is a female, brown immigrant in the current times in the USA.

Monica Seggos
The Alchemist

Alchemy: a seemingly magical process of transformation and/or creation

The artist is dragged down and held back by the weight of her life, until she can no longer move. It is time for the transmutation of the past into the present and the possibilities of the future. The artist as alchemist is the creator figure. The philosopher's egg is the heart in which the experiments are made. The heart is broken by inside force, and life begins.

Diane Williams
Bound

For her performance, the artist will tie her body with a spool of neon pink plastic rope, implying the physical impression of being bound by societal restraints put on the marginalized. She will be wearing a mask sculpture from her Monsters and Aliens series and a dress/armor made out of salvaged and manipulated fiber such as: yarn, thread, fabric, and shredded paintings, interwoven and sewn together. The mask and dress force the viewer to confront the unfamiliar to look without judgment.

Factronauts
Star Date 2018, Northern California, United States of America, Earth

What if a low-budget version of the imagined future came back to analyze the present? Who would it send? It would send The Factronauts.

The Factronauts are intrepid explorers sent by their parent agency, Nor-cal Artists Seeking America into the unknown and unfamiliar world of the contemporary United States. Their mission is to collect, analyze and interpret the facts they encounter while maintaining their good humor and belief in the effectiveness of their process. A nation they no longer recognize as a familiar and safe landscape becomes other-worldly, a surreal and at times hostile place that is fractured by social, economic and politic divisions. They have become foreigners in their own backyards.

The Factronauts comprise a series of performances, docu-fiction hybrid videos that function simultaneously as documentation of the performances and part of the piece, photos and other ephemera. Peter Foucault and Chris Treggiari most frequently wear the customized explorer suits while Vita and Bryan Hewitt work primarily on the media and documentation aspects.

Sculpture

Victoria Heilweil and Phil Spitler
Luminous Waveforms

CNC cut ¾” birch plywood and LED lighting

Luminous Waveforms is an illuminated seating arrangement made up of two parametrically designed sculpted wooden benches. The organic curves are inspired by nature and soundwaves, sliced into a repeating rhythm. The fluid elegance of the forms and gradual color shifts from the interior illumination transform the physical experience of the seating. The artwork is both form and function.

Courtyard

Peter Hiers
Swirl

Rubber tires and mixed media, 11’ in diameter

Hiers explores that uneasy space of contradictory feelings about modern existence, knowing that his pleasures and conveniences of today come at a cost to other life forms and to long-term human survival as well. Since 2000, he has gathered fragments of exploded tires from highways for this body of work which challenges this lifestyle, and to share the disturbance he feels when he considers the human trajectory.  Enjoying both the metaphorical richness and the organic qualities of this metaphorically rich material, he uses the wildly ripped textures to raise questions about alternatives to both fossil fuels, and also ideological alternatives to American Dream materialism.

Courtyard

Installation and Social Practices

Paz de la Calzada
Alhambra S.R.O.

This installation consists of a geometric pattern found in the Alhambra Palace in Spain, made of hand-cut pieces of recycled carpet from a hotel in the Tenderloin. As a native Spaniard I am aware of the profound influences that Arabic culture left in Spain, the Alhambra of Granada being the most important example.

Inspired by the landmark Alhambra Apartments on Geary St, it calls attention to the irony of the cultural appropriation of Arabic architecture in the early 20th century and the contemporary stigmatization of Islamic people.

The Alhambra Apartments are among several buildings in the Tenderloin that are categorized as a Moorish Revival Style of architecture. This exotic style flourished after the 1906 earthquake, when the formerly residential neighborhood of single family homes was rebuilt as multistory buildings often with dramatic facades of the Exotic Revival style. Many of these buildings have become S.R.O. (Single Room Occupancy) hotels and are occupied by very low income families, mostly immigrants.

Hotel Entrance

Margaret Timbrell
Selfie Wall

Leading up to and during the stARTup fair the artist will actively solicit people to donate their auto-corrected names. She will hand embroider the auto-corrected names (ie. “Pretty” instead of Priti, “Paypal” instead of Payal, “Center” for Centa, “Drawline” for Dawline) onto a beautiful bolt of fabric installed like a tapestry to create a selfie wall of words and names. During the fair she will continue to solicit donations and stitch them onto the fabric, and encourage the act of selfie taking. The wall creates an environment for selfie taking and sharing, while the art background reveals the way that the tech sector erases the identity of many consumers. This installation will help draw attention to the subtleties of social bias within our technology and create an engagement beyond the fair with each selfie posted.

Courtyard

Hunter Franks
How to Start a Revolution

Franks refuses to accept the world as it is and is constantly investigating what could be.

He is also curious about what others see as new ways of being in the world. How to Start A Revolution installation is interactive platform allows participants to share their ideas of what revolution looks and feels like. Made from a large wooden booth with a flashing LED sign atop it that prompts passersby to both seek and contribute answers. Shrouded in a layer of mystery and privacy, the entrance to the booth is covered by a curtain.

As more and more people answer the prompt the curtain is taken back and the installation becomes an oracle of ideas for ways to create meaningful change.

Courtyard

Mikey Kelly
The Happiness Project

Kelly's work explores his interest in spirituality hacking by using language and polyalphabetic ciphers to create algorithmic programs that direct the paintings. Each piece is painted one line at a time to exacting angles to create woven layers of paint creating fields of interference patters and vibrations. For the Art Conversation Room, Kelly has created paintings on 1" cardboard panels that cover the back wall, making a stunning, visually vibrating backdrop.

Art Conversations Room 225