Flyer design by Crystal Dawana. Image by Albert Herter.

Slipper

September 22 - November 24, 2024

Featuring works by: David Bayus, Lemia Monet Bodden, Kari Cholnoky, Ximaps Dong, Erik Frydenborg, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Albert Herter, Catalina Ouyang, and Elina Vainio.

The exhibition includes three new commissions: a limited edition series of poem stickers by Claudia La Rocco, a book of drawings by Albert Herter with contributions by Joe Proulx and Jules Delisle, and the gallery’s rotating exterior sign space by Lemia Monet Bodden.

Opening Reception: Sunday September 22, 2-5pm

The opening includes a performance by Vallejo’s own abracadabra (dub duo), a presentation by V. Vale and Marian Wallace of the legendary Re/Search Publications, and beverages generously provided by Village.

Kari Cholnoky, Screaming Mimi, 2023. Acrylic, collage, wire, paper pulp 3 1/2h x 18 1/2w x 3d in. Image courtesy of Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.

Slipping between registers, like prophesy, some excessive field leaves deposits in our shared existence. It takes form, in the shape of slips of the tongue, or a slipped disc, articulated and yet still monstrous. The environment is overpopulated by tools and weapons that encode our lust or aggression into metal, plastic, or paper, infused with the unspeakable. Here is a collection of objects, of various media, that cannot be fully accounted for, that leave a remainder or lapsus, that aren’t completely discrete, and sit like cairns on a landscape, death’s representatives, recording trajectories between past and future. Marking the differences that matter, that can be utilized to situate oneself and guide a famished party.  Small signs, like fragments of fossils, can refer to immensity.  ~ Albert Herter

Slipper presents work by nine artists from the Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, and Helsinki. The exhibition includes three works as part of Personal Space’s ongoing New Works series: limited edition sticker poems by Claudia La Rocco, a book of drawings by Albert Herter, and the gallery’s rotating exterior sign space by Lemia Monet Bodden. The opening includes live music by Vallejo’s own abracadabra (dub duo), refreshments by Village, and a presentation by the legendary V. Vale and Marian Wallace of Re/Search Publications.

Don’t miss Inner Symbols, an exhibition curated by Lisa Núñez-Hancock,  featuring artwork by Shawn “Beats” Grigsby, Debra Logan, Leslie Pascal, and Frank Gillett - artists working at the Arc-Solano in Vallejo. The exhibition is on view from September 22 - November 10, in the window of Village, a forthcoming gathering place next door to Personal Space (1503 Tennessee Street).

Body Machines Chaotic Hopper

Claudia La Rocco

If you google the iconic SF punk band Flipper (an inappropriate but inevitable 2024 means of engagement with an iconic SF punk band you were too young to have seen when all the founders were still alive), one of the top results is a performance at Amoeba San Francisco on February 18, 2008. “The coalition for a drug-free America, brought to you by Pfizer,” an unctuous voice announces (cue knowing laughter). The black screen gives way: heads judder to Krist Novoselic’s irresistible bass riff, Bruce Loose yell-sings into the mic: 

There are eyes that cannot see
And fingers that cannot touch
That’s the way of the world
There are dreams left empty and blank
And legs that have ceased to walk
That's the way of the world
There are kisses undelivered
Sighs and moans unuttered
That's the way of the world
There are hearts no longer beating
And there are entrails spilled on the floor
That’s the way of the world

Plus ça change. If the entrails had green netting to hold them, they might be more neatly contained. Since, you know, the flesh clearly failed. Art for end times that just keep on (never)ending. Whatever. I put on my sound-absorbing oversized hairy architectural jacket. (I who was one of three thousand.) I went out into the night or was it late afternoon my circuitry was fucked I was, I was— 

archaeological

pseudo-mythological

technology

dreaming

CHAOTIC HOPPER

The scene was littered with dotted lines, tracing the trajectories of past and future flights and descents. I put my ear to the wall. Just, you know, just to see if I could hear (my ear had eyes). Already the present was disappearing into the sand. Something had been destroyed, was being destroyed, the body machine split open like a philosophy.

What it was, was, I’d been in the tar pits again. I couldn’t hold my horses, in part because they were hologram-like. Like, if white toe-ish organisms joined forces and thought to themselves, why couldn’t we be a horse? (We’ve all seen The Host. We know it’s coming for them while they’re busy coming for us.) Why not after all? I got depressed. I watched all of Fallout season one in two days, my ambitions dulled by old-timey music and choreographed disaster. Not good, exactly, but good enough.

You know what it was like? It was like legible data that had undergone some fundamental transformation — a kind of deep dreaming, or death, or encryption — and then reemerged in the form of a resistant Delphian artifact. In other words. Euphoria, if only you can get over your juvenile attachment to your body.

Just now, for example, I’m thinking about archaeology. This happens when the surface gets all grimy, accumulation duking it out with erosion. You have to wait for the wind to clean the sand. Desert power. Form pressed against form. I wonder how many of those bodies in that video are still in the Bay Area. How much longer Amoeba will stick it out, with or without the weed sales. Here’s to changeable creatures; you know, at a certain point, it’s all, like, research, man. The glass is cool against your foot. Everything is hand carved. The soft parts move, even (especially) when you don’t want them to.

*

With some text absorbed, abstracted, and/or abused from conversations with Lisa Rybovich Crallé; “The scene was littered with dotted lines, tracing the trajectories of past and future flights and descents,” is from Albet Herter, “One cannot have one's own house”;  “…legible data that had undergone some fundamental transformation — a kind of deep dreaming, or death, or encryption — and then reemerged in the form of a resistant Delphian artifact” ­­­is from Erik Frydenborg. 

Flyer design by Crystal Dawana. Image by Albert Herter.

Limited Edition stickers by Claudia La Rocco. Commissioned by Personal Space for Slipper, 2024.

Dvid Bayus, video still from Sessions 1 & 2, 2016-17 (27:35 min)

Albert Herter, Instauration #6, 2015. Ink on paper. 12 3/4 x 15 3/4” framed

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Sound Blanket No. 10, 2022. Hand-felted wool, human hair, and synthetic hair with satin lining and steel hardware. 62 × 55 × 11”. Images courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery.

Artist Bios

David Bayus (b. 1982, Johnson City, TN) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. His work is a cross-disciplinary practice centered around experimental film-making with a focus on the converging relationships between spirituality, technology, & crisis. He is a co-founder of BASEMENT art collective located in San Francisco's Mission District. He received his MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute in 2010. He has exhibited work in the Bay Area at Bass & Reiner, Et Al.Etc.,Telematic, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Southern Exposure, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and more. Further afield, his work has been exhibited at Vacancy, Los Angeles; Field Contemporary, Vancouver, and at Material Art Fair, Mexico City. Editions of his work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art; New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art; New York.

Lemia Monet Bodden hails from the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BFA, with honors, from New York University in Film Production. A photographer since she was 12 years old, Lemia has had her work in over 50 exhibitions, including The United Nations, Momenta Art, New York Photo Festival, DUMBO Arts Festival, MPLS Photo Center, Freies Museum Berlin, Vox Populi, Root Division, ACUD MACHT NEU Galerie, ARLES 2018, Ypsilon Art Center Thessaloniki, CICA Museum South Korea, Altonaer Museum Hamburg, and Ferencvarosi Gallery in Budapest, Hungary.

Kari Cholnoky holds an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BA from Dartmouth College, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Maw, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2021); Impending Moreness, Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago (2021); Motherboard, Real Pain Fine Arts, Los Angeles (2020); and True Level, Safe Gallery, Brooklyn (2017). Group exhibitions include CANADA, New York (2023); Rachel Uffner Gallery and Mrs. Gallery, New York (2021); Ceysson & Bénétière, New York (2020); and Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2019), among others. Cholnoky was recently a MacDowell Fellow in Painting (2023), and attended the Worth Advisory Artist Residency in Bovina, NY (2019) and the Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL (2017). The artist’s work is held in the public collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

Ximaps Dong is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, with roots in Beijing and Los Angeles. Their practice encompasses ceramics, paintings, woodworking, and sculpture, through which they aim to distill the essence of everyday life into abstracted patterned spaces. Dong's work is driven by a desire to address the anxieties and pressures imposed by power structures, offering a playful and transformative alternative centered around themes of community, grounding, humor, and well-being. They received a BA in Art History with a Studio Art concentration from San Francisco State University. Dong's artistic journey invites viewers to explore the transformative potential of art and fosters a connection to shared human experiences.

Erik Frydenborg was born in Miami, FL in 1977 and lives in Los Angeles. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA in 2005 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 1999. His work has been featured in exhibitions such as Horizontal Loader, New York, NY (2023), Chanterelle, New York, NY (2023), Knowledges, Mount Wilson Observatory, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Bloody Red Sun of Fantastic LA, PIASA, Paris, France (2015); All The Instruments Agree, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2015); Louie Louie, Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA (2014); Extra Curriculum, Komplot, Brussels, BE (2014); On Forgery: Is One Thing Better Than Another?, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (2011); California Dreamin’, Portugal Arte, Lisbon, Portugal (2010); and Drawing & Drawn, Cerritos College Art Gallery, Norwalk, CA (2006). Frydenborg has participated widely in exhibitions staged at artist-run spaces, has written essays on peers such as Amanda Ross-Ho and Sterling Ruby, and co-founded the project space AHRHWAR in 2016. His work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and public collections of the Ogunquit Museum of Art, Ogunquit, ME.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (b. 1982, Long Beach, California) earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Stanford University. They have presented solo exhibitions at the Harvard Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; François Ghebaly, New York; Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; 356 Mission Rd, Los Angeles; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among many others, and their recent group exhibitions include the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A., Los Angeles; SculptureCenter, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; the Berkeley Art Museum; and VAC Foundation, Moscow. They are the recipient of awards from the VIA Art Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Their works can be found in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center; Hammer Museum; SFMoMA; K11 Foundation, Hong Kong; and Berkeley Museum of Art. They live and work in Los Angeles.

Albert Herter (b. 1980, San Francisco) holds a BFA in new genres from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he focused primarily on video, installation, and performance. His work has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at San Francisco City Hall and Partisan Gallery, San Francisco. Herter has participated in group exhibitions at: JOAN, Los Angeles; Art in General, New York; Derek Eller, New York; Spiral Gallery, Los Angeles; and Arthouse, McAllen, TX. A pairing of the artist’s drawings and writings were recently published by Comfortable On a Tightrope and Museums Press under the title “In the Curtyard: Orchestrated Reduction of the Fantasm”. His drawings have also been featured in The Third Rail and Lacanian Ink. In addition to his artistic practice, Herter is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst. He lives and works in Brooklyn. 

Catalina Ouyang engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, and time-based projects to indicate counter-narratives around representation and self-definition. Through expansion, fragmentation, and abstraction, Ouyang proposes the body as a politicized landscape subject to partition. Working gnostically with materials ranging from hand-carved wood and stone to appropriated literature and historic artifacts, Ouyang also attends to critical reimagining of historical formation wherein monstrosity, animality, and toxicity act as ciphers for the psycho-affective alienation of the minor subject.

Elina Vainio is a Helsinki-based visual artist working with a wide range of approaches to varying materials. Her works often draw attention to human-centred worldviews, questioning how and through what kinds of lenses we come to perceive things and ultimately our place among everything. Vainio regularly collaborates with other artists and is currently a member of an experimental art collective Nomadic Kiln Group. Vainio has graduated from the Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts and the Chelsea College of Art. Her works have been shown at Lappeenranta Museum (2023); HAM - Helsinki Art Museum (2021); Wäinö Aaltonen Museum (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (2019) and Gwangju Biennale (2018), amongst others.