Uplift / Heavy Lift

Curator’s Statement

Uplift/Heavy Lift is an apt theme for this year’s juried show at Berkeley Art Center. In this year like no other, all of us have needed to shift, bend, and transform every aspect of our daily lives and creative practices as actual strategies of survival. While some of us have experienced the deepest losses of loved ones, job insecurity, and houselessness, and others of us have been relatively protected, none of us remain unscathed by the past year of COVID-19, wildfires, and racial injustice. As this tiny corner of the globe begins to reopen, it might be tempting to rush forward and to forget all that has happened since the pandemic began. But there is deep value in pausing for self-reflection — to assess truthfully how structures of racism, sexism, ableism, and capitalism have brought us collectively into this dark period, and to ponder how we would each like to re-enter the world differently, so that none of us remain left behind. Work by Jillian Crochet, one of the artists chosen for this year’s curatorial spotlight, welcomes us into this gallery and models for us one way to do just that. 

The artists selected for Uplift/Heavy Lift have crafted objects which, through their various strategies and materials, invite us to linger with the gravity of this unfolding present. Natasha Loewy quite poetically asks: “How are you holding up?” Her pieces, which hover in tension, are always a moment away from falling over, bursting, or breaking. Yet, in their graceful suspension, these works are an apt metaphor for the collective affect of this time: they keep it together, until they do not. 

Heaviness and lightness co-exist in this gallery with both intentionality and controlled chaos — much as they do in our everyday lives. The most delicate wisps of hair comprising Rochelle Youk’s Gat Sketch No. 2 are a counterpoint to Melody Kozma-Kennedy’s solid A Bench for Purists. Thematically, a number of the artworks in the front of the gallery might help us reconsider the challenges of being Asian/American in a moment of heightened anti-Asian violence, especially Anh Lee’s a patch of sky and Kacy Jung’s 21 Grams, the Weight of Soul Series – Grocery Bag #3. Their repurposing of the most mundane objects — a plastic bag and disposable masks — recast with porcelain and resin, respectively, invoke the fragile safety that those of us racialized as Asian feel. Some of the brightest works in the show simultaneously serve as memorials: Cristine Blanco’s Buried Thoughts and Callan Porter-Romero’s Reclaiming the Resurrection of Us. Through the Spirit Screen, the largest work in the show by curatorial spotlight awardee Tracy Ren, offers a place of contemplation for those we have lost. Unsurprisingly, many of the featured artworks deal with transitions, grief, and mourning. Yet the beauty of all the pieces included in Uplift/Heavy Lift remind us of the joy we can and do still experience during the creation and the viewing of art.

Joy, pleasure, love: these emotions and sensations buoy us in the heaviest of periods. We see and feel that celebration in the raucous freedom of Judit Navratil’s performances and videos, the neon brights of Mel Prest’s paintings, the gorgeous movement of those featured in Marcela Pardo Ariza’s Kin Streets series. Stewardship for the environment and non-human creatures is as valuable as love for our human communities, as Amrita Singhal, Clea Felian, and Leeza Doreian point to in modes ranging from satirical to pensive. Felix Quintana (the third artist chosen for the curatorial spotlight) has shared with us brilliant and bright collages from the series para los lil homies that manifest love for and with his community, a reminder that we can never make it through alone. Finally, the resilience and care of the local art community — evidenced in all who applied, all who are showing, all who are in attendance and who continue to support the Berkeley Art Center — is as much a work of art on display here as any of the objects in the space. 

It is a daunting task to be asked to respond creatively to catastrophe, yet this exhibition manifests so many people’s commitments to witnessing through cultural production. We love to see it. Thank you to all the participating artists and to Berkeley Art Center for creating a space for us to linger, to reflect, and to move through this time, together.

—Thea Quiray Tagle

About the Curator

THEA QUIRAY TAGLE is a curator, art writer, and assistant professor of gender & sexuality studies and critical ethnic studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her transdisciplinary research investigates socially engaged art and site-specific performance, visual cultures of violence, and modes of survival amid waste in the expanded Pacific Rim. Thea holds a PhD in ethnic studies from the University of California, San Diego, and her writing has been published in popular and academic venues including American Quarterly, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Art Practical, and Hyperallergic. She has curated exhibitions, written exhibition and catalog texts, and produced public programs for institutions including the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen), and the Vachon Gallery at Seattle University.