With Dani Burlison & Matthew Izen, Dani DiAngelo and Sebastian Vogel, Perry Doane, Ian Dolton-Thornton, Daniel Glendening, Laeh Glenn, Ben Kinmont, Heike Liss, Irma Rodriguez, and Martìn Zuniga
Austerity has had strange effects on the cultural sphere. In education, specifically, administrators seem to have had a hard time deciding if their students are products or consumers. This confusion has resulted in the acceleration of a broad tendency to shift community education resources towards vocational training and away from the liberal arts. It is not coincidental that this trend is expressed most forcefully in public institutions. Under these conditions, the creative impulses of the vast majority of people, and especially young working people, are increasingly directed towards “making a living” (or servicing debt), at the expense of everything else.
There is an analogue to this trend in popular narratives relating to the arts, often presented as a paradox of self-valorisation. In these narratives, the figure of the artist is both an exemplar of the typical secular Calvinist ideal of self as enterprise-machine, but also as eccentric to the extent of complete dysfunction and incapable of a “normal” career. This is why the whole thing is seen to be slightly suspect, and is constantly called upon to account for any (public) resources allocated to it (preferably in terms of some positive impact on economic development). Some measure of commercial viability must be named as a redemptive feature for a vocation that is otherwise synonymous with both poverty to the point of starvation AND with the worst excesses of the luxury goods marketplace. In short, the artist is seen to be captured entirely by the logic of the marketplace, but somehow simultaneously miscarries, exceeds or otherwise escapes this logic. This is why a career in the arts involves a compulsory, unending and competitive search for interlocutors and advocates in the form of curators, critics, gallerists and other Professionals who are schooled in smoothing over these discomfiting inconsistencies. In this sense, the cultural sector mirrors the larger vision of civilization as a speculative bloodsport conducted under conditions of intensifying artificial scarcity.
What is often missing from this picture is attention to the relationships and (usually unpaid or underpaid) labor that support or produce the development of works of art–this is often referred to as culture. This exhibition explores how the practices of 10 artists living in Sonoma County are informed by a range of communal or relational activities and enterprises that complement their personal work in the arts. Much of the work in the exhibition emphasizes networks of support among artists and their communities, an interest in unconventional exhibition frameworks and locations, and a commitment to sociality as a feature of the arts. Although their work displays a range of approaches, their manifold practices might be loosely characterized by an engagement with a central question: How do we think about and define the systems by which we assign value, aesthetic interest and social utility?
Special thanks to Chris Woodcock and the students in Art 53: Exhibition design and management. Image: Ben Kinmont, On being and power, 2021.
Martìn Zuniga’s paintings are produced in workshops with groups of young people that take place in a variety of different social contexts. He works with the arts advocacy group Raizes to realize these projects. An autodidact in work and art, Martín has learned his craft by doing. After high school, Martín began work in construction, learning the skills he would soon transfer to his art – welding; framing; understanding the strength and qualities of wood, metal, paint, plasters, lighting. Martín’s desire to be an artist was questioned, and the time and money to focus on art was always scarce. In 1990, Martín began to focus on his art. Martín’s experience as a migrant, as an undocumented worker, as a Mexican-American in the Central Valley, as a man who speaks in an accented English, and as a target of undeserved police attention, shapes his art. However, his art claims and celebrates a new world, one that recognizes and honors his roots.
Irma Rodríguez is an artisan born in San Pedro Taviche Ocotlán, Oaxaca. She learned to paint when she was a little girl watching her parents, aunts and uncles making Alebrijes. The Alebrije is a type of craft native to Mexico made of cardboard or Copal tree, painted with bright and vibrant colors. They are imaginary beings that represent a combination of several mythical and actual animals. This work has given Irma the opportunity to demonstrate her artistic ability in Sonoma County and as a tool for self-healing and preventing depression because of not having extended family locally. She uses art workshops to share her culture and to create community.
Heike Liss is a multi-media artist who takes her cues from the people and the world around her. After studying Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen, she pursued a Master’s degree in Studio Art from Mills College in Oakland, California. Heike’s award winning work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and at film festivals. She has collaborated with choreographers Sonsherée Giles and François Verret, musicians Ellen Fullman, Marcus Weiss, Caroline Penwarden, GAW, and Theresa Wong, multi-media artists Ellen Lake, Nomi Talisman, and Michael Trigilio, as well as poet Lyn Hejinian, to name a few. Since 2014 Heike has been performing live visuals with multi-instrumentalist/composer Fred Frith, as well as other musical improvisers such as Ikue Mori, Thea Farhadian and Shelley Hirsch. She lives and works in Oakland and Basel and teaches transdisciplinary Art at the Universidad Austral de Chile.
Ben Kinmont is an artist, publisher, and antiquarian bookseller living in Sebastopol, California, United States. His work is concerned with the value structures surrounding an art practice and what happens when that practice is displaced into a non-art space. Since 1988 his work has been project-based with an interest in archiving and blurring the boundaries between artistic production, publishing, and curatorial practices.
In past years he taught courses in the Social Practices Program at the California College of Arts, as well as organized various workshops with students from the École des Beaux-Arts in France (Angers, Bordeaux, Bourges, and Valence), Cranbrook Academy in the US, and the Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands. Exhibitions include those at Air de Paris, Whitney Biennial 2014, ICA (London), CNEAI (Chatou), the 25th International Biennial of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana), the Frac Languedoc-Roussillon (Montpellier), Documenta 11 (Kassel), Les Abattoirs (Toulouse), the Pompidou, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a traveling survey show of Kinmont’s work entitled “Prospectus” (Amsterdam, Paris, New York, and San Francisco). He is also the founder of the Antinomian Press, a publishing enterprise which supports project art and ephemera.
Laeh Glenn is an American visual artist. She is based in Sebastopol, California. Her work addresses the digital life of an image; namely, how repetition and sharing influence image quality and how painting has the ability to converse with damaged images. From 2016-2020, she was active in the production of the Los Angeles-based exhibition space Potts.
Daniel Glendening’s multi-disciplinary practice is rooted in embodied experience and utopian thinking. Some past projects include an artist-led paranormal research team; poetic manifestos cast in concrete; a novel about Mars, cults, and gardening; and lamps made out of loaves of bread. Recent paintings, including February 13, 2021, position the garden as a utopian project.
Daniel and his wife Emily organize Labor is a Medium (LiaM), an exhibition project occupying a freestanding wall in their garage in Santa Rosa. LiaM hosts exhibitions with an emphasis on work that demonstrates its process; that addresses the political through oblique pathways; and/or that challenges capital. Driven by a desire to create a space to connect in community, LiaM is a vehicle to offer artists, friends, and neighbors a little bit of space, a little bit of time, and a little bit of food. The pizza is always free.
Ian Dolton-Thornton is an artist and designer based in Santa Rosa, CA. He was formerly the director of the Bay Area artist’s book press Publication Studio Oakland.
Perry Doane is a multimedia artist with a practice rooted in photographic image-making. His recent work draws imagery from the wildland-urban interface in which he lives, and employs a range of working methods, including digital image manipulation, painting, and silkscreen. He also maintains an intermittent, ambulatory exhibition space called French Laundry Chute.
Dani DiAngelo is a writer, farmer and restaurant worker who just opened a storefront space in Santa Rosa called Strange Constellation. For this exhibition, she has annotated the poster that Sebastian Vogel designed for the inaugural event at the space.
Dani Burlison (she/her) is the creator/editor/author of “All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger and the Female Body” (PM Press, 2019), a short story collection, “Some Places Worth Leaving,” (Tolsun Books, 2020), “Dendrophilia and Other Social Taboos: True Stories,” a collection of essays which first appeared in her McSweeney’s Internet Tendency column of the same name, and the “Lady Parts” zine series (available at Pioneers Press). She is the co-editor, with Margaret Elysia Garcia, of “Red Flag Warning,” an anthology about fires in Northern California.
Dani has been a staff writer at a Bay Area alt-weekly, a book reviewer for Los Angeles Review and a regular contributor at Yes! Magazine, Chicago Tribune, KQED, The Rumpus, Made Local Magazine and Emerald Report. Her journalism, fiction and personal essays can also be found at Ms. Magazine, WIRED, Vice, Utne, Earth Island Journal, Ploughshares, Portland Review, Hip Mama Magazine, Rad Dad, Spirituality & Health Magazine, North Bay Bohemian, The Press Democrat, Shareable, Common Good, Sustainable America, Ravishly, Tahoma Literary Review, Vestal Review, Bike Monkey Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, sparkle + blink and more.