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Contacts:
Chuck Mobley 415.863.1001 chuck@sfcamerawork.org
SF CAMERAWORK INAUGURATES NEW SPACE
WITH AN AMBITIOUS SIX-MONTH SERIES OF EXHIBITIONS
SF Camerawork’s New Mission Street Location Hosts an International Collection of Works that Explore the Past and Investigate Human NatureDownload PDF here
San Francisco, CA – 7 August 2006 – Beginning October 5, 2006, celebrated photo gallery SF Camerawork will offer San Francisco a new location at which to explore major photography exhibitions. As an expansion of the Bay Area’s only nonprofit contemporary and digital media photo gallery, SF Camerawork’s new location at 657 Mission at Third Street, in the Yerba Buena Arts District, will host a variety of renowned artists examining
the influences of the past, the disconnect of the urban environment and the question of exploitation in everyday photography.
The new space will be inaugurated with the opening of Ghosts in the Machine, which includes a commissioned performance video installation by Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom titled Bells. Shot in the Boot Cotton Mill in Lowell, MA, this new work reflects on the impact of industry on the body. The 19th-century mill has a room with 200 operating weave looms, positioned in a way that creates a powerful visual perspective and metaphor for the repetition and alienation of production. As machines were developed during the Industrial Revolution, the bodies that operated the machines were studied as virtual motors, quantified and measured in order to increase production. In Bells, five women positioned inside the factory perform unison movement that speaks about the
ways in which the wealth of nations depended on the laboring body. Drawing on photographic studies from early industrial efficiency experts, such as Etienne Marey, Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Gilbreths, Carlson and Strom have built a thought- provoking movement piece.
I. Ghosts in the Machine
October 5 – November 18, 2006
Opening with the new gallery will be Ghosts in the Machine, which delves into the subtle influences of history on contemporary artwork. Guest curated by David Spalding, Ghosts in the Machine explores how elements of the past return to haunt the present in works of contemporary photography and digital media. The exhibition brings together artists from Finland, Lebanon, Vietnam and the United States to conjure the forgotten faces and demolished places that flicker at the far reaches of personal and cultural histories. Featuring 33 works, Ghosts in the Machine examines photography’s role in the construction of counter-histories and presents works by artists who have developed inventive strategies to revive and assimilate what might otherwise be forgotten.
“Unlike previous shows, it is not an exhibition about the paranormal, the aesthetics of ghosts, or the history of photography, though it will raise questions about all of these
things,” says Spalding, an independent curator and art critic. “Rather, Ghosts in the Machine explores the notion of haunting as a set of cultural conditions that arise when estranged moments in national histories and collective memory are not given their due.”
Ghosts in the Machine serves as an exemplary vehicle to introduce the Bay Area to SF Camerawork’s most ambitious gallery space yet, featuring photographic works by Dinh
Q. Lê, Mildred Howard, Jorma Puranen, Tony Hooker, Walid Ra’ad, Claudia Kunin and SF Camerawork’s newly commissioned performance video installation by Ann Carlson
and Mary Ellen Strom.
II. Traces of life on the thin film of longing
January 9 – March 7, 2007
Traces of life on the thin film of longing is an exhibition of three films by Jem Cohen, Jenni Olson, and Natalie Zimmerman that considers the photograph in relation to film. Each film, though differing in subject matter and narrative technique, is composed of lengthy still shots of the urban environment; rendering an approach reminiscent of the photo essay.
In Chain, filmmaker Jem Cohen introduces us to a world that has become America, LLC; shot over ten years in seven countries, it is a political film about global acquiescence to a corporate cultural environment comprising malls, hotels, airports, office parks, theme parks, chain stores, and chain restaurants. Jenni Olson’s film The Joy of Life, composed entirely of still shots of San Francisco, consists of a two-part narrative voice-over by a young butch lesbian recounting the trials and tribulations of her love life and trying to come to terms with the grim history of the city’s suicide landmark: the Golden Gate Bridge. Natalie Zimmerman’s Islands introduces fifteen casting-call respondents in Los Angeles, interspersed with images of the LA landscape; lonely, desolate, and barely familiar as the great sprawling metropolis most know only as home to the film and television industry.
“The distinction between the mediums of film and photography has always been tenuous at best,” says SF Camerawork Associate Director Chuck Mobley.” This exhibition challenges audiences to respond to the ‘white cube’ gallery space in a new way.”
III. Not Given: Talking of and Around Images of Arab Women
March 13 – May 5, 2007
Based on the collection of photographs housed at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, Not Given, guest curated by Dore Brown and Isabelle Massu, challenges the photograph’s privileged status by interrogating its discursive context, exploring the skin of words that surround photographs of “Arab women” in a bold attempt to shatter the reductive label that has been assigned to them. The photographs in this collection, exhibited as large-scale projected images in digital format andaccompanied with an audio component featuring voices of Arab and Arab-American women, are stunning in their diversity, often calling into question preconceived notions of Middle Eastern photography. Some of the images – a 1940s starlet from Cairo, a Lebanese women posing with her rifle and young son, or a group of fashionable young women perched on the hood of a car in Palestine – seem to defy genre. By exhibiting the Foundation’s keyword classification system along with the images, Not Given exposes the logic and the difficulties inherent in classifying such a moving target, a logic that the Foundation is
itself struggling to redefine by changing and expanding its terminology.
Notes SF Camerawork’s Executive Director, Sharon Tanenbaum, “The most exciting innovation of this exhibition is the way the immense projected images interact with the
audio installation of Arab women from all over the world speaking about the photographs. It's amazing the way the women's voices occupy the gallery as if a crowd of women inhabits the space. Visitors to the exhibition will notice that the photograph enters their imagination and that their perception of the image is altered as they listen to an audio loop of Arab women’s voices from Beirut to Algiers to Marseille to San
Francisco being piped into the gallery."
About SF Camerawork
Founded in 1974, SF Camerawork has historically been an artist-driven organization focused on supporting emerging and mid-career photographers. Its mission is to push the boundaries of what constitutes photography and image-making while serving as a launching pad for careers in the photographic arts. While SF Camerawork has been offering exhibitions and programming for the past five years in a gallery space it formerly
shared with New Langton Arts at 1246 Folsom Street, thedecision to relocate began in 2001 after leaving their previous long-term site at 115 Natoma. SF Camerawork’s 6,500-square-foot new location on Mission at Third Street, designed by Donna
Schumacher of X: architecture/Art and with lighting design by Rebecca Foster, features a new 3,000-square foot gallery space, which can be divided into several separate gallery areas depending on the exhibition schedule, nearly doubling SF Camerawork’s previous exhibition and programming spaces.
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