Hope is Discipline
Jamil Hellu, Untitled (Silhouette) and Untitled (Pink) from the Odyssey series, 2022. Courtesy of Rebecca Camacho Presents.
September 30–November 11, 2022
October 21, 6:30pm: Art Talk
Featuring:
Libby Black
Craig Calderwood
Jamil Hellu
Jaime Knight
Wei Keong Tan
Corrie Willes
Curated by: Marc Mayer
“The only lasting truth is change.” - Octavia Butler
In the wake of anti-LGBT legislation sweeping the nation, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and threats to democracy, how do we deal with the devastation and uncertainty of losing our rights? While struggling with feelings of futility, the words of organizer, educator, and prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba provide us with a useful mantra, “hope is a discipline.” Kaba recognizes hope as an important survival mechanism and makes the case that hope is not “dumb cheer, empty aphorisms, or baseless optimism,” but crucial, clear-eyed, visionary work.
This exhibition presents the work of LGBTQ artists in the Bay Area who employ practices such as world building, alter-egos, performance, pleasure, humor, disco/music, and speculative fiction to imagine alternate spaces, realities, and possibilities, not only spark hope but also challenge prejudice in order to foster a sense of belonging. These practices, many of which have long histories in LGBT communities, present models of how the joy of culture can reconnect us to the world and remind us that anything is possible, if we are willing to fight for it.
About the Artists
Libby Black is a painter, drawer and sculptural installation artist living in Berkeley, CA. Her artwork charts a path through personal history and a broader cultural context to explore the intersection of politics, feminism, LGBTQ+ identity, consumerism, addiction, notions of value, and desire. Her sculptural works are to-scale re-creations of objects (some from her own life, some fictional) made of paper, hot glue, and acrylic paint. She arranges these three-dimensional renderings of domestic objects, books, magazines, handbags, and shoes in still-life arrangements, creating hybrids that mix the real and the imaginary. Black also produces two dimensional paintings and drawings based on imagery culled from disparate sources like fashion magazines, newspapers, her own photos, and books. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with such shows as “California Love” at Galerie Droste in Wuppertal, Germany; “Bay Area Now 4” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; “California Biennial” at the Orange County Museum of Art; and at numerous galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
A self-taught artist, Craig Calderwood’s intricate and decorative works are rendered through a personal vernacular of symbols and patterns. Recalling the private languages that underground communities of queer and trans people used for safety for decades, Calderwood develops these patterns and symbols though research into history, personal narratives, and pop cultural moments. They then arrange them into constellations to tell stories both personal and fantasized.
Utilizing low-end materials like fabric paint, polymer clay, found fabrics and fiber tip pens, Calderwood explores ideas around desire, biodiversity, and otherness. They also look at how material practice forms its own language for safe and coded communication within hostile environments.
Flexing the intended use of their mediums, Calderwood’s work moves through the material ideologies of painting, drawing, and textile, to form images whose lines and textures teeter between thread and paint, blurring not just the binaries of their materials, but of their subjects.
Jamil Hellu is a visual artist working on themes of queer identity, visibility, and cultural heritage,while expressing a shift towards a world beyond binaries. Navigating from a personal lens, his work weaves together strategies of performance and photographic representation to point to the tensions found in the evolving discourse about sexuality.
Hellu is the recipient of the San Francisco Art Commission Grant, Zellerbach Family Foundation Community Grant, Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, and the Kala Art Institute Fellowship Award. His projects have been covered in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Artforum, and VICE. Hellu has exhibited at the Armory Show, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Aperture Foundation, SF Camerawork, and San José Institute of Contemporary Art, among others.
He holds an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University and a BFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. Hellu has held art residencies at the Cow House Studios in Ireland, the San Francisco Recology, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Public collections holding his work include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, and Blanton Museum of Art. Hellu is a photography lecturer in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. His work is represented by Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco.
Jaime Knight is an artist and arts educator working in a variety of materials to make prints, photographs, sculpture and drawings. His work is an ongoing exploration of the dialectics bearing on the formation of queer subjectivity, both his own and culture at large. He takes prompts from ancient greek pottery, disco and the radical politics of the post-sexual revolution 70’s; as well as his own experience growing up during the height of the AIDS epidemic ravaged Regan years. His work is in library and museum collections across the US and he has shown individually and in group shows nationally and internationally. He has collaborated on large projects at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries and Outsider Fest Austin. Knight received his MFA at the University of Iowa, an MA in Arts Education from San Francisco State University and a BFA from the University of New Mexico. He is teaching faculty in print and photography at the California College of the Arts. He lives in Oakland, CA.
Wei Keong Tan is an animation filmmaker who explores his gay identity through personal storytelling and fantasy worlds. He is currently a resident at SFFILM FilmHouse for his next short and feature development. His most recent short film, Kingdom (2018), has been selected to compete at the Berlin International Film Festival. His previous film, Between Us Two (2017), received the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Short at Outfest LA and the Best Singapore Short Film award at Singapore International Film Festival. His highly acclaimed body of work received international recognition at many film festivals, including those at Annecy, Zagreb, Stuttgart, Taipei and Toronto. Wei Keong’s interest in new media led to exhibition pieces including Muybridge's Birds (2021), a video collaboration with Jim Campbell in San Francisco; and Notes of the Lighthouse Keepers (2016), which was shown at Headlands Center for the Arts in California. He was awarded the Young Artist Award by the National Arts Council of Singapore in 2019.
Corrie Wille is a ceramic-based artist from Long Beach, California. Corrie earned an MFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in 2022 and a BFA in Ceramics from California State University in 2019. With clay, glaze, and an affinity for science fiction, Corrie builds vaguely anthropomorphic sculptures that exist in an imagined extra-planetary future. Like ceramics from ancient human history, perhaps these objects will follow suit, surviving the centuries to serve as relics of this time on Earth. Maybe they will become genuine alien artifacts to future travelers to this planet, but at present they hold imagined tales of a utopian future of weirdness, queerness, and play. The acts of piercing and decorating mimic Wille’s own modifications in a playful way and serve as an assertion of bodily autonomy. Each piece undergoes trials by water, air, heat, and pressure to complete its transformation from amorphous muck to a strong, fantastical creature. Building with material capable of such change abstractly reflects Corrie’s personal evolution and inspires optimistic imagination of what could be.
About the Curator
Marc Mayer is an independent curator and educator. He has worked at institutions including the San José Institute of Contemporary Art, Asian Art Museum, Art21, the New Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. He has spent much of his professional career cultivating new and existing audiences through innovative programming and exhibitions aimed to connect art, ideas, and people. He has organized exhibitions, projects, and programs with artists including Jean Shin, Carrie Mae Weems, Sanaz Mazinani, Ranu Mukherjee, Mark Bradford, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Saya Woolfalk, Lee Mingwei, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Mark Dion, and Ala Ebtekar. In 2018 he was awarded a research fellowship at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in South Korea. Mayer received a BA in American Studies from Wesleyan University.