The group exhibition All Good Things… and accompanying performances investigate the legacy and contemporary form of West Coast time-based conceptual art as well as the unique relationships forged between objecthood, experience and temporal structures. During the course of the exhibition featured artworks fundamentally change, evolve, degrade, are consumed or are fully realized. Featured works include photography, video, sculpture, time-based art and installations.

The show is designed and curated to exist and then disappear. For this reason, gallery visitors may not take photos or record video while in the gallery. Instead, cassette recorders are available for visitors to share their impressions. These recordings—captured live in the SOMArts gallery—serves as an imperfect, ephemeral record of the exhibition and are the only archive of its existence aside from hearsay, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the popular internet ethos “pics or it didn’t happen.”

Melting artworks on view during regular gallery hours include a caramelized sugar installation by Gay Outlaw, and a sculpture by Kos that must be refreshed with a new block of ice daily. Ice water pours through negative space between a fifteen-foot-tall wooden vee creating a deconstructed icicle as the block slowly descends.

Chris Fraser transforms the entire gallery into a site-specific, time-specific camera obscura by cutting a series of small holes in the walls to choreograph the light of the setting sun across the room. Light fades and deteriorates silver gelatin prints of photographs of  landscapes and domestic situations by John Steck Jr. These images are unfixed and will inevitably fade into nothingness. A large-scale lenticular image by Heather Sparks, mutable depending upon the viewer’s location, samples colors present in the artist’s skin and requires movement of the viewer in time to see the variable image.

Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde exhibits wall-scale documentation of a cloud he created in April 2013 in conjunction with the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery’s exhibition Conversation 6: Jason Hanasik and Berndnaut Smilde, curated by Meg Shiffler. Smilde spent three days in the Green Room of San Francisco’s War Memorial Veterans Building, creating clouds and orchestrating a photo shoot with renowned photographer RJ Muna.

The gallery annex features Mauricio Ancalmo’s “War Footage (Fifth Articulation),” a piece which utilizes an altered 16mm film projector missing a take-up reel, which spools onto the floor a length of red film leader. The unspooled leader must eventually be manually rewound, gesturing toward the burden of postwar reconstruction.

The Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts, in collaboration with Director Shalini Agrawal and Scholar in Residence Chris Treggiari, presents a newly designed gallery-based interchange that offers a framework to develop a socially engaged process. This interchange, open to all participants, suggests methods to help connect with community partners, develop related art and design projects and collaborate with diverse participants.

*image (left)
“Nimbus Green Room”
© Berndnaut Smilde
photograph by RJ Muna
originally commissioned by the San Francisco