Bay Area Now 7

 

 

 

 

 

Adobe Books Backroom Gallery is excited to announce our participation in:

Bay Area Now 7

The triennial exhibition takes place at YBCA July 18 – October 5, 2014

Opening Night Party, Friday, July 18, 8-11 p.m.

YBCA Grand Lobby, Galleries and Forum
YBCA, 701 Mission Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94103
415.978.2787; www.ybca.org!

In its seventh edition, Bay Area Now 7 is experimenting with a new approach to curating that highlights collaborations with our region’s artists and arts organizations and pushes beyond presentation toward a multidisciplinary celebration of the diversity of artistic practices in the Bay Area. BAN7’s core idea is to decentralize the curatorial process, and centralize the public presentation of some of the most exciting artistic voices in the region today.

Adobe Books Backroom Gallery’s participation in BAN7:

Everyone’s Place

Curators: Calcagno Cullen, Christopher Rolls

Participating Artists: Aaron Bray, Kristin Farr, Lori Gordon, Marc Kate, Jeff Meadows, Erik Otto, Brian Tester

Adobe Books Backroom Gallery has been an integral part of the Adobe Bookshop and the Mission District art scene since 2001. The Backroom Gallery is an experimental arts space that aims to be both welcoming and nurturing ground for young artists. With this in mind, we have created a project that creates a cozy and intimate creative space within the galleries at YBCA.

Artist and cooperative member Aaron Bray has created a structure that is both warm and inviting as well as meditative and hermetic. Artist Kristin Farr has filled the structure with several of her “hugging chairs”, which offer a place to sit as well as the colorful and soft comfort of someone holding you in the space. The space is meant to evoke the safe haven feeling of Adobe Books, welcoming visitors to step inside and spend some time contemplating and participating in the space.

Sound artists Marc Kate and Brian Tester created a subtle interactive auditory component to the installation. Ambient tones generated by Marc Kate freely float amongst the environment outside Aaron Bray’s Space while Brian Tester manipulates those tones via Pythagorean tuning in order to vibrate the structure’s interior with “pure” calming sound.

The surrounding installation provides a colorful intensity, meant to mimic the backdrop of San Francisco, and specifically the Mission District, in which many of these artists work and within which The Backroom Gallery sits.

Local artist Erik Otto, installation artist Kristin Farr along with her partner Jeff Meadows, and social practice artist Lori Gordon have created an environment of geometry and words, evoking the spirit of Adobe as an all-inclusive, experimental space. This surrounding installation provides a colorful intensity, meant to mimic the backdrop of San Francisco, and specifically the Mission District, in which many of these artists work and within which The Backroom Gallery sits.

Bay Area Now 7: Visual Arts Exhibition:

The visual arts component of Bay Area Now 7 has been reconceived through an open and rigorous selection process. By inviting noncommercial, small- to mid-size regional visual arts organizations to curate site-specific projects with Bay Area artists in YBCA’s galleries, we are making visible the rich complexity of our many arts communities. Using an art fair style format in which the selected participants curate projects for specific locations throughout an exhibition space, BAN7 celebrates visual arts organizations as vital players in the local arts ecology. The exhibition aims to foster increased appreciation for Bay Area art, artists and organizers, and to promote a greater understanding of the vast range of practices and individual visions that make the Bay Area such a vibrant center for contemporary art.

The 15 partner organizations working with YBCA—featuring more than 70 artists throughout our galleries and campus—are [ 2nd floor projects ], San Francisco; Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, San Francisco; Bay Area Art Workers Alliance, Oakland; Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco; Creativity Explored, San Francisco; di Rosa, Napa; the Estria Foundation, Emeryville; FOR-SITE Foundation, San Francisco; Important Projects, Oakland; Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga; n/a, Oakland; Pied-à-terre, San Francisco; Publication Studio, Oakland; San Quentin Prison Arts Project, San Quentin; and Stairwell’s, San Francisco. These organizations were selected out of 50 proposals submitted to an open call conducted in fall 2013, and were reviewed by a distinguished panel of curators, scholars, and writers.