My Mission Playground by Gordon Winiemko
Gordon Winiemko
Adobe Books Backroom Gallery presents My Mission Playground, solo exhibition by artist Gordon Winiemko
OPENING RECEPTION, Friday, January 9th, 7-9pm
EXHIBITION DATES: January 9th – February 1st, 2015
Adobe Books Backroom Gallery
3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA 94110
MY MISSION PLAYGROUND
Adobe Books Backroom Gallery is pleased to present My Mission Playground, an exhibition by artist Gordon Winimko, opening January 9th, 2015. For his first solo exhibition in San Francisco, Winiemko is channeling the indignation felt by many long-time residents regarding the new wave of gentrification into a playful, confrontational, and above all thoughtful meditation on not only what’s going on in San Francisco and the Mission in particular, but also the societal values that are fueling gentrification and income inequality across the country. Winiemko uses his personal relationship to what many are considering a public crisis as a point of departure for a series of new performative video work created for this exhibition. He looks in on the nice young tech worker couple that is willing and able to pay three times the rent he used to pay for his tiny studio apartment, creating a portrait of how the city has changed. And, for the centerpiece of the exhibition, Winiemko turns the Mission into his own personal basketball court, drawing on sports as a metaphor for the “beat the other guy/winner take all” mentality that is imbricated in the American mindset. As he dribbles and shoots his way across the Mission, Winiemko affects an obliviousness to the niceties of the social contract characteristic of the gentrifier. At the same time, the artist references the apparent need to divide social and psychic space along oppositional lines like our team/their team, oppressor/oppressed, hero/douchebag.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Gordon Winiemko works with social customs and cultural idioms, those “things we do” that are sometimes so commonplace that we often forget how they shape our lives, for better or worse. His video, performance, and participatory work has been exhibited in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, across the country, and internationally. In San Francisco he has exhibited at such venues as ATA, Intersection for the Arts, The Lab, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, SOMArts, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. His guerilla performance in which he evicted Mission revelers from restaurants and bars at the height of the dot-com boom was covered by NPR “All Things Considered” and the Los Angeles Times. His film “Enjoy,” about the neon Coca-Cola billboard South of Market, was named one of the best films of the year on an SF Bay Guardian critic’s poll. The artist received his MFA from UC Irvine and currently lives in the Los Angeles area.