Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

An iconoclastic artist, Nathalie Talec moves between live performance, installation, sculpture, and painting. The One Who Sees Blindly, her first solo exhibition in the United States, brings together many of her recurring themes.

At the point where long-held beliefs fall into decline and once-esteemed notions crumble, questions arise about those belief systems. It is at this point that John-Mark Ikeda begins his exploration of the current economic climate. Ikeda deconstructs the iconic business suit — which he equates with the failed economy — stripping it down to its component parts and pinning it to the wall like a specimen, with accompanying business accessories, in an attempt to reconstitute it as a symbol of power.

The latest Room for Big Ideas installation, Reimagine: That Which We Know But Don’t Realize, explores the ways in which we simultaneously create and conceal meaning in landscapes, and how that process defines us in relation to our environment.

By Aleksei Guerman
After the banning of Trial on the Road, Guerman turned his attention to another WWII story. In the winter of 1942, Soviet Army Major Lopatin (Yuri Nikulin, a celebrated comic actor and circus performer cast against type) returns to his own home town to deliver the effects of a fallen comrade to the dead man’s wife. Above all a film of intimacy and tenderness, Twenty Days is Guerman’s melancholic tribute to those who remain on the homefront in times of war, and how none of them escape without their own physical and emotional scars. (1976, 101 min, 35mm)