letter from the network
2024 Juried Members EXHIBITION
may 25th - july 6th, 2024
JURIED BY PJ Gubatina Policarpio & juan omar rodriguez
exhibiting artists:
Katherine Akey, Jordan Benton, Daniel Brickman, Amy Brown, Sydney Brown, Mary Campbell, Kristiana Chan, Lynse Cooper, Tara Daly, Dale Eastman, Elina Frumerman, Emma Gobler, Courtney Griffith, Charlotta Hauksdottir, thad higa, Becky Jaffe, Clementine Keenan, Isabella King, Kimiko Kogure, Ahn Lee, Dani Lopez, Catherine Mackey, Mary V. Marsh, Teddy Milder, Parul Naresh, Morgann Nieto, Liam O'Connor, Kelley O'Leary, Youngmi Angela Pak, Rosa Park, Jeanna Penn, Callan Porter-Romero, Tana Quincy Arcega, Sophia Ramirez, Priyanka Rana, Yunfei Ren, Abel Rodriguez, Renetta Sitoy, Andrew Sun, Paul Taylor, Daniela Tinoco, Larisa Usich, Laura Van Duren, Yue Xiang.
opening reception: Saturday, May 25th 2-5PM
closing reception: Saturday, july 6th
How do we hold complexity—in our minds, in our arms, across our relations? The urgency of the multiple environmental, social, and political crises we are undergoing necessitates that we take our entanglements with each other seriously. While rendering us vulnerable—what affects one element of our interconnected world can affect us all—our mutuality and being-with-the-world is what sustains us.
Keeping the loops that bind us across space and time in mind, this year’s Juried Members Exhibition brings together over forty artists from the Bay Area who collectively map out the contours of our increasingly complex world. Drawing from the title of Kelley O’Leary’s single-channel video in this exhibition, Letter from the Network explores the ecological, emotional, political, and social implications of leaning into our entanglements.
Many of the artists in this exhibition explore a range of ecological intimacies, tracing our connections with other forms of life as if following rhizomatic or mycelial networks. Through fragmentation and layering, Charlotta Hauksdóttir’s richly textured landscapes grapple with the imperfections of memory and the destructive impacts of climate change. Hauksdóttir’s works articulate a sense of loss, mobilizing affect to remind us that we are continuous with the world and can take part in its regeneration. Lynse Cooper’s Lorenzo and Callan Porter-Romero’s Contemplating life in the sun engage with nature as a space of retreat and rest, further emphasizing the importance of centering reciprocity in our ecological networks.
The spirals of time, as another structure that situates our lives in a much larger continuum, informs the work of many other artists in this exhibition. The ceramic sculptures by Kristiana Chan and Tara Daly function as artifacts and monuments for speculative futures drawn from local and art historical precedents. Abel Rodriguez and Andrew Sun offer tender representations of their communities, giving new life to existing memories on one hand and adding form to more ephemeral moments on the other. Guided by the frictions of the present, their works invite us to orient ourselves intentionally in relation to our forebears and those who will come after.
With networks and letters as the guiding frameworks for this gathering of artists, we invite you all to consider these questions as you move through the exhibition: who, or what, forms the network? What messages are they communicating, and to whom? Will you accept their invitation to respond?
Juror’s Awardees:
Daniel Brickman, Callan Porter-Romero, and Abel Rodriguez
About the Curators
PJ Gubatina Policarpio is a curator, educator and community organizer with over 10 years of experience in arts and culture, leading innovative and rigorous initiatives that engage artists and diverse communities. He has organized exhibitions and programming in San Francisco and internationally, including Notes for Tomorrow (Independent Curators International, 2021-Present), Under the Same Sun (Edge on the Square, 2023) Notes on Cultural Evidence (slash art, 2023), Conversations on Carlos Villa: World-Making and Cross-Cultural Solidarity (Asian Art Museum, 2022), Tarsal by Metatarsal (Headlands Center for the Arts, 2021), Solidarity Struggle Victory (Southern Exposure, 2019), and Rally: Queer Art and Activism (Dixon Place, 2017). PJ is co-founder of Pilipinx American Library, an itinerant library and programming platform dedicated to diasporic Filipinx perspectives. His publications are in the collection of the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Born in the Philippines, PJ immigrated to the United States in his early teens. He lives and works between San Francisco and New York City.
Juan Omar Rodriguez (he/him) is an assistant curator at the San José Museum of Art. His recent curatorial projects include Encode/Store/Retrieve, Chelsea Thompto: The Fog, and Liliana Porter: Actualidades / Breaking News at SJMA. Juan Omar previously held curatorial positions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in addition to organizing several exhibitions as an independent curator. His writing has been featured in the Latinx Project at NYU's online arts publication, Intervenxions.