Title: Conversation 3: Amy Globus & Cynthia Ona Innis
Dates: April 20 - June 3, 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.
In the North Gallery we will be exhibiting Electric Sheep, a video installation by Amy Globus. The video depicts an octopus slowly exploring a series of interconnected clear plastic tubes and tanks. The movements are remarkably sensual as outstretched tentacles carefully investigate new environments and delicate pink skin presses and undulates against the sides of the tubes. The soundtrack for Electric Sheep features EmmyLou Harris singing of love, loss, pride and vulnerability in her gravelly ballad Wrecking Ball. The title of this work comes from Phillip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, (which inspired the 1982 movie Blade Runner). This title hints at the possibility that what we think we see may be a facsimile. Globus received her MFA from Columbia University in 2001. Electric Sheep has been exhibited internationally at such venues as D'Amelio Terras Gallery (New York), Museum Riena Sofia (Madrid), and the 2004 Liverpool Biennial.
For this exhibition the SFAC Gallery invited emerging painter Cynthia Ona Innis to create her first site-specific installation in our South Gallery. Innis utilizes a wide variety of media in her paintings including ink, paper, satin fabric, acrylic paint and various stains. Influenced by growth and decay cycles, her central forms range from biomorphic cell structures to intricate networks of thin vein-like lines and drips. In shifting from a two-dimensional surface to three-dimensional space, Innis has created hundreds of pod-forms that appear to be emerging parasitically from or receding into the architecture of the Gallery. This new installation incorporates her familiar palate of fleshy pinks, raw reds and earthy browns and greens. Innis received her MFA from Rutger's University in 1994. She exhibits her work regularly at Braunstein Quay, and has exhibited at the Headlands Center for the Arts, PS122 Gallery (New York) and the Walter Maciel Gallery (Los Angeles).
