Slow Dialogues: Time, Space, and Scale

Exhibitions

Slow Dialogues: Time, Space, and Scale

April 22–July 10, 2016

Slow Dialogues: Time, Space, and Scale invites holistic, reflective and critical understandings of both our immediate surroundings and our greater environment. Exploring the themes time, space, and scale, three international artists bring their diverse creative perspectives and approaches into site-specific dialogue with social, cultural, and environmental conditions of the Bay Area.

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Artist and architectural preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos continues his ongoing series The Ethics of Dust, exploring what he considers to be humanity’s most prolific, and neglected, cultural product: pollution. Exploring the theme of time, Otero-Pailos was commissioned to create a latex cast of more than one-hundred years of accumulated pollution on the two chimneys of the Old United States Mint. This otherwise invisible and often overlooked material is transferred onto translucent sheets of latex, preserving the material realities of the site, and local histories of labor, resource extraction, industrialization, global capitalism, and urban redevelopment.

Megumi Matsubara’s It is a Garden (2016) engages with YBCA’s building through a site-specific installation of prints, photographs, glass, film, and mirrors. Inspired by the site’s close proximity to the Yerba Buena Gardens, Matsubara asks through her work “What are the invisible elements that define a garden’s presence? The constant effort of watering, caring, acting? The climate? The soil underneath?” Matsubara’s investigation of space through both visible and intangible layers of the site invites visitors to discover new sensorial and mental landscapes as part of a larger, multifaceted ecology of place.

In Traveling Geometry (2008-16), designer Maria Blaisse exhibits a dynamic array of sculptural bamboo forms, demonstrating her vision for the near-future: a humanity-built environment that is flexible and closer to nature. Two woven structures are displayed alongside film and photographs in which dancers engage them in graceful interplay. Another collection of simple bamboo lines suspended from the Grand Lobby ceiling activate the upper registers of the building, and will occasionally be lowered down to the lobby floor and engaged by live performers during the exhibition; a work exploring different scales.

Slow Dialogues is curated by Slow Research Lab, a Netherlands-based multidisciplinary research and curatorial platform that seeks to explore an expanded field of human awareness and activity through research residencies, workshops, exhibitions, reading groups, immersive study experiences, and dialogues.

Maria Blaisse, Traveling Geometry, 2008-16. Installation view, Slow Dialogues: Time, Space, and Scale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Charlie Villyard. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Megumi Matsubara, It Is a Garden, 2016. Installation view, Slow Dialogues: Time, Space, and Scale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Charlie Villyard. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Jorge Otero Pailos, The Ethics of Dust: Old United States Mint, San Francisco, 2016. Installation view, Slow Dialogues: Time, Space, and Scale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Charlie Villyard. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Jorge Otero-Pailos

Maria Blaisse

Megumi Matsubara

About Slow Research Lab

Slow Research Lab is a multidisciplinary research and curatorial platform based in the Netherlands.

Through a mix of theoretical reflection and creative experimentation, Slow Research Lab investigates an expanded terrain of individual and collective potential that brings balance to the pace at which we encounter the world, and integrity to how we position ourselves within it.

In that sense, the word ‘Slow’ is intended not only to inspire a different velocity of engagement, but also to evoke a quality of being, characterized by critical thinking, deep spaces of reflection, and the unique forms of creative expression that are born of them. The term is used both as an adjective and as an active verb that describes the pursuit of more holistic ways of knowing oneself, encountering others, sharing knowledge, and evolving together toward more harmonious and resilient forms of living. The thinkers and creative practitioners who contribute to Slow Research Lab are designers, architects, artists, ecologists, technologists and other creative activists whose experimental, often speculative forms of practice challenge the conceptual, methodological and experiential boundaries of their varied disciplines.

They are invited to engage in dynamic processes of dialogue, the artifacts of which range from ephemeral, (im)material experiments to large‐scale urban interventions. Those tangible traces of Slow creative process are an important means through which the fuller realm of engagement Slow Research Lab envisions can be accessed, and they are catalysts to further investigation.

Slow Research Lab shares its work with the public through research residencies, workshops, talks, exhibitions, publications, reading groups, immersive study trips, and in-situ dialogues. These are vital spaces of exploration and stimulation for creative practitioners from a range of disciplines, cultivating new visions and an enhanced palette of tools with which to more fully embrace – and know oneself part of – a complex, interdependent world.

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Slow Dialogues: Time, Space and Scale

“Jorge Otero-Pailos’s research series ‘The Ethics of Dust’ encourages reflection on one of humanity’s most neglected, and also most pervasive, cultural products: pollution.”

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Slow Dialogues: Time, Space, and Scale and the participation of Maria Blaisse are supported by the Consulate General of The Netherlands in New York.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is grateful to the City of San Francisco for its ongoing support.

YBCA Programs in 15-16 are made possible by: The James Irvine Foundation

Additional Funding for YBCA Programs 15-16: National Endowment for the Arts, Adobe, Gaia Fund, Grosvenor, and Members of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

YBCA Exhibitions 15-16 are made possible in part by: Mike Wilkins and Sheila Duignan, Meridee Moore and Kevin King, and The Creative Ventures Council.

Free First Tuesdays underwritten by: Directors Forum Members.

Lead Image: Jorge Otero Pailos, The Ethics of Dust: Old United States Mint, San Francisco, 2016. Installation view, Slow Dialogues: Time, Space, and Scale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Charlie Villyard. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.