SECA 2013

The work of four Bay Area artists will appear in unexpected places from September 14 through November 17, 2013, as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents site-responsive projects by the 2012 winners of its signature SECA Art Award: Zarouhie Abdalian, Josh Faught, Jonn Herschend, and David Wilson.  

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Images courtesy of the artists and SFMOMA ^ 

David Wilson, Searching Notes (preparatory drawings related to Arrivals), 2013; ink on folded paper; dimensions variable; commissioned by SFMOMA; © David Wilson; photo: courtesy the artist.


DAVID WILSON

Oakland based artist David Wilson engages with experience of place through
a meditative drawing practice and through the orchestration of site-specific gatherings. The events that he organizes as 'Ribbons' grow out of long periods of space discovery and plein air study, and draw together a wide net of artists, performers, filmmakers, chefs, and artisans, into situation based collaborative relationships. He was recently awarded SFMOMA's 2012 SECA Award, was included in the 2010 CA Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, and had a 2010 MATRIX exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Southern Exposure recently awarded him an Alternative Exposure grant to support his work dreaming up spirited ways to bring people together.

— davidwilsonandribbons.com

Zarouhie Abdalian, Occasional Music (preparatory photograph showing space between buildings in downtown Oakland), 2013; public installation in downtown Oakland: brass bells and electronics; dimensions variable; commissioned by SFMOMA, courtesy the artist and Altman Siegel San Francisco; © Zarouhie Abdalian; photo: courtesy the artist.

ZAROUHIE ABDALIAN 


Abdalian received her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2010 and since then has exhibited solo projects and participated in several group exhibitions, both in the Bay Area and abroad. She made a site-specific architectural work for the international exhibition Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), 2011 that also utilized the properties of sound. Modifying the architecture of the biennial building, she affixed transducers to the backs of the gallery’s drywall, causing the room to literally vibrate—a sensation that could be both heard and felt; a plumb bob hanging from the far wall rattled against the surface, rendering the vibrations of the wall visible. More recently, Abdalian was awarded SFMOMA’s 2012 SECA Art Award; as part of that exhibition, she will have a sonorous public artwork on view in downtown Oakland beginning in September.

— http://bampfa.berkeley.edu

Josh Faught, BE BOLD For What You Stand For, BE CAREFUL For What You Fall For (detail), 2013; site-specific installation; hand-dyed and hand-woven texile; commissioned by SFMOMA, courtesy the artist and Lisa Cooley, New York; © Josh Faught; photo: Ben Blackwell

 

JOSH FAUGHT
 
Josh Faught lives and works in San Francisco. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Lisa Cooley, New York (2012, 2010); Western Bridge, Seattle (2010); and the Seattle Art Museum (2009). His work has been featured in group exhibitions at University Art Museum, Albany (2012); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2011); Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft (2009); and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2007), amongst others. Faught is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2011) and the Betty Bowen Award, Seattle Art Museum (2009). He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an Assistant Professor at the California College of Arts. 

— http://www.camstl.org

Stories from the Evacuation (still), 2013; HD video, color, sound; commissioned by SFMOMA, courtesy the artist and Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco; © John Herschend

JONN HERSCHEND

Raised in a midwestern amusement park, Jonn Herschend is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and experimental publisher whose work explores fiction, reality and the narrative structures that we employ as a way to explain the chaos and clutter of our everyday lives.  His videos, performances, installations, and photos all incorporate sterile and formally recognizable structures such as PowerPoint presentations, academic lectures, photographic evidence, infomercials, gallery exhibitions, or educational videos.  He uses these structures as a means to investigate the issues of truth and confusion, and allows the messiness of reality to eventually collapse the whole piece.

His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including Den Frie Contemporary Art Center in Copenhagen, Denmark; Diverse Works, Houston Texas; the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Southern Exposure and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; the San Francisco International Film Festival, and a current commission for SITE Santa Fe and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  He is the co-founder and co-editor, along with Will Rogan, of the experimental publication THE THING Quarterly, and is a recent recipient of a Danish Arts Council grant for his work as co-curator, along with Heidi Hove, of the Deadpan Exchange international exhibition series.  He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California Berkeley, San Francisco State University, California College of Art and Stanford University.
 

 — jonnherschend.com

 
 

 

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