Tuesday, January 20, 2009

2005-06 Conversation 1: Oliver Herring & Tim Sullivan

Title: Conversation 1: Oliver Herring & Tim Sullivan
Dates: November 10, 2005 - January 18, 2006
Location: The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery (main gallery), 401 Van Ness Ave., SF, CA
Conversations is an ongoing series of exhibitions at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery featuring a local artist alongside an artist from another point on the globe. The intent of this series is two-fold: on an intimate level it allows for a closer look at the production of two individual artists, and it also informs an expansive perspective of how artists from our region participate in an international contemporary art dialogue.



New York-based artist Oliver Herring's live-performance pieces, sculpture, and photographic and video works have often involved extended interactions with strangers. In the North Gallery we will present a series of videos from Herring's ongoing series, BASIC. Beginning in 2002, Herring has periodically invited strangers to work collaboratively to generate "something of interest" while the camera rolls. The resulting documentation takes viewers into the artist's studio and playfully exposes the creative process.



Tim Sullivan, a San Francisco-based artist, also utilizes performance, sculpture, video and photography in his practice. For the past few years Sullivan's work has been influenced by an interest in the work of Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader and his mysterious disappearance at sea in 1975, as well as the life and early death of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. Presented in the South Gallery, Sullivan's These Days obliquely references these influences through a disjointed narrative involving an earthquake, a set of books, ripe vegetables, a hovering body, and the sulfurous scent of struck matches.