Flier with title of gallery, "Naming Our Time" above a red circle in the center. Black wavy shapes go across the bottom half, growing taller towards the middle. Text at the top details the artists, curator, and dates of the exhibition.
 
 

naming our time

October 27, 2023 - January 13, 2024

Tosha Stimage, Charlene Tan, Alexa Burrel and Erina C. Alejo. Curated by Qinjin Montoya

PUBLIC PROGRAMS:

Friday, October 27, 5-8PM: Opening Reception

© Carla Hernández Ramírez

 

Curator’s Statement

In response to chaos, brokenness, and tragedy there is the tendency to seek out a single, vetted, solution, some fixed, grand method of order that one can count on to solve, fix, and make right. In a moment defined by the effects of climate change, global pandemics, historically charged race and class reckonings and so much more, it is crucial to examine how these tendencies toward self-preservation and belonging are further complicated when the tragedy and chaos many marginalized beings experience are, in fact, features of the socially constructed systems we engage in everyday. These realities leave many of us asking: In the face of real and symbolic entropy, how do we call upon our individual wholeness? How do we find personal comfort, belonging, or even salvation? With these questions in mind, through a rigorous and thoughtful blending of image, labor, gathering, and storytelling, Naming Our Time is an integrated presentation between artists Tosha Stimage, Charlene Tan, Alexa Burrel and Erina C. Alejo of the historical, sonic, material, and natural landscapes through which we navigate meaning, material, identity, and kinship. 

 
A medium-skin toned person smiling, they have medium length black hair, wire frame glasses, a blue shirt, and large transparent orange and green earrings. The background is blurred and includes a plant and windows.

Erina Alejo
Photo: Evelyn Anderson

A black and white photo of a woman with a slight smile, she has medium length curly hair, a septum nose piercing, and is wearing large earrings shaped like paper clips.

Alexa Burrell
Photo: Adrian O. Walker

A smiling medium-dark skin toned woman with no hair in front of an orange background. Her hand is placed on her chest, and she is wearing large hoop earrings, a septum nose piercing, and a black turtleneck.

Tosha Stimage
Photo: Courtesy of the artist

A medium skin toned woman wearing a gray sweater and blue apron is sitting sorting through strips of black and white plastic in the process of making her artwork, which is to her left, and consists of those strips woven into a canvas.

Charlene Tan
Photo: Shaun Roberts

 

erina alejo

Erina Alejo (they/them/siya) is a lens-based artist and cultural worker whose work responds to care, community action, and cultural preservation through their lens and body as a third-generation San Francisco, CA tenant. Their sensory ethnographic practice as a timekeeper sustains long-term collaborative relationships with micro communities-- including families, tenants, and service workers-- that, in turn, protect and archive these important narratives of labor and anti-displacement resilience. Alejo has gratefully received support from the Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco Arts Commission, Southern Exposure, Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center grants and has work in the collection of SFMOMA. Through their upcoming Lucas Artist Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center, Alejo will focus on a multiplatform project shedding light on multigenerational households like theirs (they live at home in with their parent in their 20+ year old apartment in San Francisco’s Excelsior District).

Alexa Burrell

Alexa Burrell was born in San Francisco, CA. She is an experimental multidisciplinary collage artist who weaves together field recordings, video composites, projections, animations, sculptures and archival materials to create lush fantastical and evocative narratives that compare the emotional and material, natural and technological, and scientific and spiritual. Alexa has worked as an artist in residence at Audium Theater of Sound, Kala Art Institute, Montalvo Art Center, and Paul Dresher Studios. She is currently a member of Real Time and Space studios.


tosha stimage

Tosha Stimage is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Oakland, California. She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, and a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design. Stimage’s work centers language and examines its modality in relation to our human systems. Her installations involve painting, drawing, print, floristry, and collage work that reassign historical visual forms, their transmission, and context for the here and now.

charlene tan

Charlene Tan is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work is thematically focused on the immigrant diaspora and its repercussions, post-assimilation identity, and anthropological investigations of nationalism and cultural heritage. Her work is inspired by her Filipina-Chinese-American identity, reconnecting her artistic cultural heritage of tribal weaving patterns of the Philippines. Using found images by means of digital scanning, these images are edited to pair down to the essence of the pattern.


qianjin montoya

Qianjin Montoya is assistant curator at The CJM. Her practice includes curating, writing, and research, with a focus on institutional histories and the narratives of women and people of color. Her curatorial research has been featured in exhibitions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco) and in programming at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is is an Emerging Arts Professionals (EAP) SF/Bay Area Fellow alumni and is the current Americas Collection Research Fellow at Kadist in San Francisco. Montoya holds a Master of Arts in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts, and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley.