RABBIT HOLE

AUGUST 12 - SEPTEMBER 23, 2023

Fred Marque Dewitt, Mark Harris, danielle nanos-luz, Courtney Desiree Morris, Arleene Correa Valencia, and Connie Zheng. Curated by Adrianne Ramsey.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS:

Saturday, August 12, 2–5PM: Opening Reception
Tuesday, August 29, 2–8PM: Artists in Conversation with ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA. On zoom. Click to register
Friday, September 8, 6–8PM: Oñí Ocan: a Ritual Performance by COURTNEY DESIREE MORRIS. At Berkeley Art Center. Click to register

Curator’s Statement

Rabbit Hole takes a deeper look at the significance of space and the subtle and obvious ways that we engage with it on a daily basis. Space can take place in many forms – personal, public, institutional, communal, mental, etc. – and has its own sets of rules and expectations. Those who enter these spaces are confronted with the choice, or necessity, to play by the rules – or break them. While we maintain various degrees of fluency in navigating the spaces we traverse every day, as space is tied to both history and geography, our concepts of it change as our memories transform over time. The act of remembering is a site of critical and generative excess; contained to reverie, remembering resides in an illimitable space, extending out and in towards what was, or what perhaps was, or what could have been. Therefore, how do we define space, and how does it in turn influence our individual and collective identities? 

Featuring a wide range of materials and theoretical approaches, the participating artists are united by a conscious engagement with today’s cultural moment, in which numerous social factors – ranging from a global pandemic to widespread civil unrest to an increasingly acrimonious political landscape – have converged to produce a heightened urgency for artists to utilize space as a means of empowerment. The exhibited artworks, all of which were made in the last two years, challenge, explore, and reflect upon our interactions with the spaces we enter and call attention to, as well as their own impacts on ourselves and society. 

fred marque dewitt

Fred Marque Dewitt studied filmmaking at San Francisco State University. His painting, sculpture and performance are focused on deconstructing notions of white supremacy as promote in early American art. He was the first Artist-in-Residence at Platform ArtSpace, the UC Berkeley Art Department’s public practice venue, and was a 2020 recipient of the Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award. He graduated from UC Berkeley with an MFA in Art Practice in 2021.  

MARK HARRIS

Mark Harris is an emerging, conceptual collage artist whose work captures the complexity of the current social political climate in the United States, particularly as experienced by African Americans. His powerful compositions reflect his lived experience, which he translates into visually stunning and thought-provoking works. His collages are a combination of historical imagery and digital elements, creating a visual language that is both contemporary and deeply rooted in history. Harris has already garnered attention for his cutting-edge approach and compelling vision. His work has been exhibited at the de Young Museum, Exploratorium, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and Ohio Wesleyan University, among others. He has received critical acclaim for his ability to tackle complex issues in a visually striking way, The Metro Silicon Valley News called his work “brilliantly subversive.” Born in Durham, NC and raised in Atlanta, GA, Harris developed a passion for visual arts at a young age and is self-taught. He currently teaches painting and drawing at San Francisco University High School, as well as an after-school art program at Malcolm X Academy in the Bayview-Hunters Point. As an emerging artist, Mark Harris is poised to make a significant impact on the contemporary art scene, and his work promises to challenge and inspire audiences for years to come.

COURTNEY DESIREE MORRIS

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/performance artist and an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (Rutgers University Press). As an artist, her work is concerned with ancestral memory, ritual work, ecology, climate change, death, mourning and funerary practice, and black feminist aesthetics. Her work focuses primarily on examining ancestral narratives and everyday ritual aesthetics among communities throughout the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, and West Africa. She works primarily in the fields of large-format portrait and landscape photography, experimental video, performance art, social practice, and installation art. She has shown work and performed at the National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica), the Ashara Ekundayo Gallery (Oakland), the Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, WA), the San Francisco LGBT Center, Root Division (San Francisco), the Frye Museum (Seattle, WA), the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Madrid, Spain), the Jordan Schnitzer Museum (Eugene, OR), the San Francisco Art Institute, Fototeca de Havana (Cuba), the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), Slash SF, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), SOMArts (SF), the Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía (Córdoba, Spain), A.I.R. Gallery (NYC), and the Berkeley Arts Center. She lives and works in Berkeley, CA.

danielle nanos-luz

danielle nanos-luz is a memory worker who utilizes film, writing, dialogue, and action to center the possibility of collective liberation in everyday life. Focusing on the transformative potential of memory and dreams, her explorations range from reconstructing inherited narratives to envisioning futures through an internationalist lens.
 danielle was born and raised in the Bay Area and is currently based on Huchiun Ohlone land. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley in 2017, where she studied postcolonialism and visual culture as an Art History major. In 2022 she earned her MLIS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. danielle is a 2021-2023 Kaleidoscope Scholar (Association of Research Libraries), 2021 Midwest Library Service Scholarship recipient (UIUC), 2020-2021 Spectrum Scholar (American Library, Association), and 2020 Sylvia Murphy Williams Scholar (Illinois Library Association). She currently works as an archivist at the Freedom Archives and is a grassroots community organizer with GABRIELA Oakland. 

arleene correa valencia

Arleene Correa Valencia is a Mexican artist living and working in Napa, California. In 2020 she received her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Correa Valencia was awarded a regional Emmy award for her feature REPRESENT by KQED Arts. She is a recipient of Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals, which she has used to work and study since 2012. Correa Valencia is one of four children originally from Arteaga, Michoacán, Mexico. Her family migrated to the United States in 1997 and established themselves in California’s wine country, Napa Valley. Her upbringing and migration narrative are the inspiration behind her practice which she uses to explore her identity as a registered “illegal alien.” 

connie zheng

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer and experimental filmmaker based out of xučyun (Oakland, California). She works with maps, seeds, food, environmental histories, speculative fiction, field recordings and hand-drawn animation. Her projects frequently include participatory scenarios and seek to diagram dynamic relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally, through venues such as the Peabody Essex Museum, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Framer Framed (Netherlands) and Sa Sa Art Projects (Cambodia), with upcoming presentations in Canada and Switzerland. She has received fellowships and awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Minnesota Street Projection Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation, and her work is held in the collections of the Kadist Foundation and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. Her essays have appeared in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, Errant Journal and SFMOMA’s Open Space. She holds BAs in Economics and English from Brown University and an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California — Berkeley, and is currently a PhD student in Visual Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

adrianne ramsey

Adrianne Ramsey is an independent curator, writer, and arts editor. She has organized exhibitions for Root Division, Berkeley Art Center, and USC Roski Galleries, and is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of GIRLS Magazine, an online publication that interviews femme-identifying contemporary artists, art professionals, curators, and writers about art, politics, and their individual practices. Her writing on contemporary art and culture has appeared in several publications and exhibition catalogues, and her recent achievements include being the Outstanding Graduate Student, M.A. Program at USC's Roski School of Art and Design (May 2023), Inaugural Artist Power Center Artist of the Month (July 2022), and a 2020 YBCA 100 Honoree. She is also Director of Communications of Art Into Acres, a non-profit environmental, art, and land conservation initiative, and holds both a B.A. in Art History and M.A. in Curatorial Practices from the University of Southern California.