David Wojnarowicz. What is this little guy's job in the world, 1990. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P•P•O•W, New York.

Something (you can’t see, on the other side, of a wall from this side) casts a shadow
July 14–August 14, 2018
SOMArts, San Francisco

With works by Yuji Agematsu, stanley brouwn, A.K. Burns, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Shannon Ebner, Phillip Greenlief, David Hammons, Carl Hendrickson, Zoe Leonard, Delcy Morelos, Senga Nengudi, Catherine Opie, Gordon Parks, Davina Semo, Stuart Sherman, David Wilson, and David Wojnarowicz.

Something (you can’t see, on the other side, of a wall from this side) casts a shadow explored the politics of space in the urban landscape. It shifted the focus away from real estate or city development and towards the human body, emphasizing individuals who claim and appropriate public space in ways other than property ownership. The exhibition included a range of works where bodies, particularly those who have been historically less privileged and more vulnerable, challenge the forces that threaten to make them invisible, especially when urban planning, economic growth, public policy, and underlying societal stigmas seem to overshadow and disempower them.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a writing exercise that poet Ed Roberson gave to his students while he was a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 2014. The assignment appears in Dodie Bellamy’s essay “In the Shadow of the Twitter Towers,” published in her collection When the Sick Rule the World (semiotext(e), 2015), which forms the basis for a reading room that was also part of the exhibition.

During the exhibition’s opening, musician and composer Phillip Greenlief performed YERBA BUENA, a graphic score commissioned for this exhibition, presented alongside four more graphic scores by Greenlief. And, on July 26, writers Dodie Bellamy, Daphne Gottlieb, and Tongo Eisen-Martin had a conversation in response to the exhibition and offered readings from each of their work.

Special thanks to all the artists, lenders, Sonya Yu and Zack Lara for their support, as well as the team at SOMArts, especially Maria Jenson, Carolina Quintanilla, Matt McKinley and Sarah Pritchard.

© All texts and photos my own unless otherwise indicated.

David Wojnarowicz. What is this little guy’s job in the world, 1990. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P•P•O•W, New York.

David Wojnarowicz was a painter, photographer, writer, performance artist, filmmaker, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s. Having grown up in an abusive family and struggling with his own homosexuality, he dropped out of high school and was living on the street by the age of sixteen. After living in San Francisco and Paris, he settled in New York in 1978. He died of an AIDS-related illness at the age of 37.

Many of Wojnarowicz' visual and written works incorporate experiences from his personal history as well as stories of individuals stigmatized by society that he encountered on the streets or while being on the road. In the late 1980s, after he was diagnosed with AIDS, Wojnarowicz's life and work took a political turn, becoming involved with debates around medical research and funding, morality and censorship in the arts, and the legal rights of artists.

Wojnarowicz was also compassionate with the pain of others. Even though he used human figures to convey emotion through his work, he also wanted to take that power away from people and give it back to “nature” by using animals as metaphors for the pain and injustices he was faced with. That is the case of this photograph of a hand holding a small frog accompanied by a series of simple yet powerful questions.

Something (you can’t see, on the other side, of a wall from this side) casts a shadow exhibition view. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Gordon Parks. Invisible Man Retreat, Harlem, New York, 1952. Courtesy of The Gordon Parks Foundation.

Gordon Parks was born in segregated Kansas. The youngest of fifteen children, he used to recall a childhood of poverty and racism yet blessed by family love. However, all hope seemed lost when he was sent to live with his sister in Minnesota after his mother died, but was soon thrown out and forced to find a way to live on his own. It was during this time that he learned to turn his anger into a creative force and taught himself how to use a camera. He became a photojournalist and magazine photographer, and, by the 1940s, he was well-known for his iconic photographic essays in Life magazine and for the memorable pictures he took of celebrities and politicians, such as Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. He later became the first African American to produce and direct major motion pictures, developing films relating to the experience of slaves and struggling black Americans, and creating the "blaxploitation" genre as the director of the 1971 film Shaft.

By the late 1940s, Parks was a successful photographer and Ralph Ellison was an established author working on his novel, Invisible Man, which would be published a few years later. Inspired by their shared belief in racial injustice and the communicative power of images, Parks and Ellison collaborated on several occasions. In the August 25th issue of Life magazine, in 1952, they published an article accompanied by a series of photographs titled “A Man Becomes Invisible: Photographer Recreates the Emotional Crisis of a Powerful New Novel,” on the occasion of Ellison’s book release.

Invisible Man Retreat, Harlem, New York, 1952 was one of the photographs included in the article. It illustrates a scene in Ellison’s novel, where the unnamed protagonist describes a “hole” he built under the streets of New York to keep himself warm. But this underground retreat was ultimately a place to satisfy the protagonist’s desire to no longer feel invisible, and so he covered its ceiling and walls with hundreds of lightbulbs, revealing the presence of his own body. In this scene, the protagonist also describes a radio-phonograph he had in this room and his plan to have five of them, all playing at the same time, so that he would be able to hear Louis Armstrong singing and playing “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue” and to feel the vibrations of the sounds in his body.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. (From Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, 1952)

stanley brouwn. Constructed Walk — 3000 Steps, 1971. Collection of Nell and Jack Wendler. Photo by Kevan Jenson)

stanley brouwn was a conceptual artist interested in space. Between 1960 and 1964, he produced the seminal series This Way Brouwn by asking passers-by to sketch the way from A to B for him on a piece of paper, which he would then appropriate as his own work by adding his stamp “This Way Brouwn.”

This stack of three grey metal filing cabinets contain 3000 index cards that provide a precise record of steps, which adds up to 2,583,453 millimeters, with each step measuring somewhere between 840 and 880 mm. Whether or not the artist physically took these steps remains unclear, but with this work, he boldly claims that his body navigated, and therefore occupied, a precise portion of space. By typing each card manually, the artist highlights the uniqueness of each step and the variations inherent in the mark left by each moment of physical contact between the body and the space it encounters.

Stuart Sherman. Still images of video selections from the Eleventh Spectacle (The Erotic) and Eighth Spectacle (People's Faces), c.1979. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Artist, performer, filmmaker, and writer Stuart Sherman originally came from a background in experimental theater. Between 1975 and 1994, he developed a series of thematic “spectacles.” He invented a unique style and format in which he would create relationships and situations between small and cheap objects that he manipulated with quick and assertive movements, similar to those used by magicians and street hustlers. These short plays, presented on a card table, sometimes in small theaters or domestic settings, but also in parks and other urban public areas, allowed the objects to gain a life and personality of their own, and to become metaphors for how humans interact with each other and the world. While he developed a rigorous and methodic performative style, his spectacles were filled with vulnerability, humor and meditative attention, as if engaged in a shamanistic ritual.

A.K. Burns. Unknown Unknown, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and KADIST. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

In a 2002 press conference, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answered a question about the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by explaining that there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The artist A.K. Burns used these phrases in a trilogy of similar steel sculptures. Resembling the black metal fences that appear throughout public spaces in many urban centers, Unknown Unknown incorporates these words within the vertical bars of its steel grid. In an expanded and more general sense, an “unknown unknown” could refer to the many different types of people who share city streets and who are unknown to each other. This reality is an obstacle but also an opportunity: it creates a division between people but also an invitation to engage. In a similar way, this metal gate, as an object in the gallery space, is both a barrier as well as a site for potential interaction and exchange.

Catherine Opie. Untitled #16 - Freeway Series, 1994. Courtesy of the artist and KADIST.

Photographer Catherine Opie is mostly known for her color portraits representing queer communities in Southern California. However, in the mid-1990s, observing the ways in which identity is shaped by architecture, she created a series of images of freeways. With these panoramic photographs, the artist deliberately avoided showing people, cars, or any other elements besides the architectural structures. Through this body of work, the artist wanted to bring attention to the fact that while freeways are meant to connect different urban and suburban areas, they are also structures that separate and segregate communities within cities. SOMArts, for example, is in close proximity to one such freeway, and the underpass is the intersection of various communities and stories.

At first, Opie had originally planned to print these images as large murals, but after developing the contact prints, she recognized that the sharp details revealed in a platinum print and the small scale could be a more powerful way to address the large and imposing presence of these architectural structures.

Something (you can’t see, on the other side, of a wall from this side) casts a shadow exhibition view. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Abraham Cruzvillegas. Wright Imperial Hotel, 2004. Courtesy of the artist and KADIST. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Abraham Cruzvillegas grew up in Ajusco, a district located to the south of Mexico City, where poverty and the lack of infrastructure, combined with a landscape of volcanic rock, form the backdrop of a life in constant state of transformation. Cruzvillegas recalls that in this context, it was common for people to become construction workers – not because they had materials, a budget, or architectural training, but because “the main material they had was scarcity, so they made houses out of that.” In Mexico, this type of construction and improvisation is known as autoconstrucción, or “self-construction,” which is not a technique, but a way of living. Inspired by this, the artist appropriated this term and calls his entire oeuvre Autoconstrucción, creating sculptural works that are assemblages of ordinary found objects. Instead of replicating the architectural forms of autoconstrucción, the artist sought to pursue the idea of making something out of nothing.

Named after the Wright Imperial Hotel, a Tokyo luxury hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that was used mostly by foreigners, this sculpture involves a phone book pierced with arrows. A phone book attempts to account for a city’s inhabitants within the space of a single book but missing from its pages are all those who don’t have a phone number, which may include the homeless and the indigenous communities. While spending time in São Paulo, in Brazil, the artist learned about the Brazilian indigenous populations and inserted arrows he found there into the pages of a local phone book as bookmarks.

Phillip Greenlief. YERBA BUENA, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Phillip Greenlief. (From left to right) BELLINGHAM FOR DAVID IRELAND, 2017. THE FIFTY STATES for Tenor Saxophone (part 1), 2016. MUIR WOODS for 2 + 2, 2015. THE STATES UNITED for William S. Burroughs, 2017. YERBA BUENA, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

In the early 2000s, the saxophonists Phillip Greenlief and Jon Raskin began refining their use of graphic scores for their performances of improvised music. Raskin used leaves and twigs or images of things that he found in his local environment, and Greenlief used maps, which have been a lifelong fascination for him. Both wanted to make scores that combined a visual aesthetic with an engaging score for improvisers. Since then, Greenlief has continued making different types of map scores, and this marks the first time any of them have been exhibited publicly.

The YERBA BUENA map score was commissioned for this exhibition, which included a debut of the piece performed by Greenlief at the opening of the exhibition.

I’m thinking of YERBA BUENA as a kind of geological excavation project to investigate the history of San Francisco. My central idea for this piece is the tragedy of having your language stolen, outlawed. So my thought was to write fragments of various myths from the native tribes of the Bay Area onto the main page and then superimpose a collage of music manuscripts, map cutouts, drawings and words from the Urebure, Yelamu, Tamyen, Chalon, Chochenyo, and Bay Miwok tribes on top of it, so that only a few words here and there emerge.
—Phillip Greenlief

Yuji Agematsu. zip:09.01.05...09.31.15, 2015. Collection of Kaitlyn and Mike Krieger. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Artist and experimental musician Yuji Agematsu emigrated to New York from Japan in 1980. His time was quickly consumed by his need to make a living, and, left with little time to make art, he began a habit of finding objects on the street as he would walk from place to place in the city. He soon turned this habit into a routine and took long walks in New York as well as in cities in South America, Europe, Asia, or elsewhere in the United States.

As he walks, Agematsu collects small pieces of debris and trash from the sidewalk. When he is back in his studio, he empties his pockets and carefully places the found fragments inside a cigarette pack’s clear cellophane wrapper. Each “vitrine” is named after the dates during which the objects were collected, and zip: 01.01.15 . . . 01.31.15 features Agematsu’s findings and arrangements on each day of January 2015.

Carl Hendrickson. (Left) Untitled, 2009. (Right) Untitled, 2010. Courtesy of Creative Growth, Oakland. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Carl Hendrickson’s explorations of the way wood works are extravagant, magical, and yet paradoxically pragmatic. While cerebral palsy prevented him from pursuing very many projects—he communicated not in words but through emphasis of gesture and gaze—Hendrickson produced a small, strong body of work that exhibited great architectural prowess and ingenuity. His medium was primarily wood, a material with which he took infinite pains, making certain that each piece of wood was cut and fitted exactly as he had envisioned. He was one of the earliest group of artists to attend Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, beginning in 1976, where he worked until his death in 2014. — Creative Growth

Carl Hendrickson. (Left) Untitled, 2010. (Right) Untitled, 2009. Courtesy of Creative Growth, Oakland. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Davina Semo. MAYBE SHE FELT THE SAME, OR MAYBE HER HEAD WAS SOMEWHERE ELSE, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Davina Semo often uses heavy construction materials and found objects that have already been used, scarred, and marked, and assembles them in ways that challenge the notions of power that these materials imply. These abstract assemblages, instead of celebrating the harmonious unity of different parts, point to the tension and separation inherent in built environments. In the case of this new work, a thin piece of metal creates a barrier, to which the artist added a steel wire rope to draw a delicate line.

To title her works, Semo uses literature, text messages, sports commentary, and excerpts from overheard conversations as a way to contrast the heavy physicality of the sculptures with a more poetic and narrative dimension, as if the metallic materials were part of a story and had an expanded life of their own. By doing this, the artist points to the connection between the type of artworks that exists in an art exhibition and the “artworks” created naturally on the street every day.

David Wilson. Walk to a Place, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

David Wilson. (Left) Walk to a Place, 2018. (Right) It Will Change, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

For years, Oakland-based artist David Wilson has been making what he calls “pocket drawings”: he takes a folded piece of paper that he can fit into his pocket and uses it to record the landscape he encounters during his frequent walks through the city. He draws quickly and spontaneously, and since these pages live in his pocket, they also become the surface the artist uses to record everything from shopping lists, notes to self, addresses, songs he wants to add to his playlists, etc. It Will Change is an example of one of his pocket drawings.

On the occasion of this exhibition, Wilson created a self-guided walking tour departing from SOMArts into the surrounding neighborhood. Exhibition visitors were welcome to take a copy of it and follow the instructions made by the artist. One of the suggestions was to take an object found during the walk, bring it back to SOMArts, and leave it on the gallery floor near Wilson’s work. These objects accumulated over the course of the exhibition.

David Wilson. It Will Change, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

(Left) Shannon Ebner. (Right) David Wilson. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Shannon Ebner. (From left to right) Symbolic Command Signal No. 2, 2009. Symbolic Command Signal No. 3, 2009. Symbolic Command Signal No. 1, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Shannon Ebner’s work is situated at the cross-section between photography and language. She brings together her own photographs with various forms of writing, such as poetry or political speech. She often uses cardboard, wood, or cinder blocks to construct physical letters or phrases, which she then photographs in the studio or in an outdoor landscape.

In the triptych Symbolic Command Signals No. 1, 2 & 3 (2009), Ebner combines three photographs of pedestrian-crossing signals. While these objects usually provide a clear and unambiguous message to pedestrians, the symbols in Ebner’s images appear to overlap and to lose their distinct separations, telling viewers to “walk” and “not walk” at the same time.

Something (you can’t see, on the other side, of a wall from this side) casts a shadow exhibition view. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Delcy Morelos. Adentro (Inside), 2010. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Over the course of the past three decades, Delcy Morelos has produced a range of paintings, sculptural objects, and large-scale site-specific projects. Her two primary materials are dirt and various tonalities of red paint, but instead of combining them, she expands their individual possibilities: she makes abstract red paintings on canvas but also creates three-dimensional objects by layering and manipulating paint. In the same sense, while she uses dirt collected in different parts of the world to make large site-specific installations, she also uses it as a pigment to paint with.

Although Adentro (Inside), at first glance, appears to be a rigid square, it is composed of a range of organic, flexible, and changing elements. For Morelos, the body cannot be disassociated from the land and nature at large. In this piece, the artist applied many layers of red paint over a natural fiber mesh, which she then folded, creating a relationship between what is underneath the skin of a human body and the earth that lies underneath the surface of the ground.

With this work, Morelos points to the fact that no matter what skin color a body may have, the color of its internal organs is the same, and no matter how land is partitioned and built on, the color of its dirt underground is also the same.

Zoe Leonard. Two trees, 1998. Collection of Nion McEvoy.

What I’ve always liked about photography is that it’s such a direct way of showing what’s on my mind. I see something. I show it to you. When I returned to New York, the tree outside my window attracted my attention in a whole new way. Once I had photographed it, I began to notice similar trees throughout the city ... I was amazed by the way these trees grew in spite of their enclosures – bursting out of them or absorbing them. The pictures in the tree series synthesize my thoughts about struggle. People can’t help but anthropomorphize. I immediately identify with the tree. At first, these pictures may seem like melancholy images of confinement. But perhaps they’re also images of endurance. And symbiosis.
— Zoe Leonard

(Left) Senga Nengudi. (Right) Delcy Morelos. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Senga Nengudi. R.S.V.P. Reverie-0, 2015. Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy, New York and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York.

As an active member of the community of African American artists in Los Angeles and New York in the 1970s and 1980s, Senga Nengudi was influenced by feminism, African and Japanese dance, music, and religious rituals. She used a mixture of natural and synthetic materials, often transformed into forms that could be worn, touched, used, and brought to life.

Nengudi has said that her R.S.V.P. series grew out of the changes she experienced with her own body during her first pregnancy, and, more generally, out of the shared experience of womanhood. The works in this series are made with flesh-colored pantyhose that the artist stretches and fills with sand, creating bulbous shapes and overly extended lines. They evoke the artist’s interest in how the human body is the recipient of, and becomes transformed by, life events, struggle, and resilience: “I am working with nylon mesh because it relates to the elasticity of the human body. From tender, tight beginnings to sagging…the body can only stand so much push and pull until it gives way, never to resume its original shape.” For the artist, however, the female psyche is more resilient, and, like the pantyhose, it can “stretch, stretch, stretch and come back into shape.”

Senga Nengudi. R.S.V.P. Reverie-0, 2015. Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy, New York and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

(Right) David Hammons. Phat Free, 1995/9. Kramlich Collection. (Left) Senga Nengudi. R.S.V.P. Reverie-0, 2015. Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy, New York and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. Photo by Kevan Jenson.

Phat Free begins with nothing but a series of loud, metallic sounds that could be heard throughout the entire exhibition space. After a few minutes, the source of the sound is revealed with the appearance of the ghostly image of man kicking a bucket down the street at night.

As one of the few known videos by David Hammons, Phat Free expands on the artist’s interests in visibility and invisibility, in claiming tangible and intangible spaces systematically made unavailable or threatening to disenfranchised communities, as well as his habit of wandering the streets as a way to encounter situations, people, and objects that he then incorporates into his work in different ways.

View of the exhibition’s reading room. The selection included books about or chosen by the artists in the show, as well as books by the writers in the event that took place on July 26th.

On Thursday, July 26, writers Dodie Bellamy, Daphne Gottlieb, and Tongo Eisen-Martin had a conversation in response to the exhibition and offered readings from each of their work.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a writing exercise that poet Ed Roberson gave to his students while he was a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 2014. The assignment appears in Dodie Bellamy’s essay “In the Shadow of the Twitter Towers,” published in her collection When the Sick Rule the World (semiotext(e), 2015), which forms the basis for the reading room that was also part of the exhibition.

Dodie Bellamy.

Tongo Eisen-Martin.

Daphne Gottlieb.

Juana Berrío

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