Films
Co-Presented by GaHee Park, Michael Vass & YBCA |
Saturday, October 24, 2026, 2 PM
This program of silent shorts features three multi-hyphenate artists-filmmakers-performers influential to GaHee Park’s work. Their shared obsessions—performance, masks, doubles, alter egos, identity games, interior journeys—run through every corner of GaHee Park: Behind the Curtain.
Enjoy the film and themed snacks as part of this series inspired by GaHee Park’s exhibition Behind the Curtain. Come early or stay late to visit our galleries—free admission is included with your ticket!
Charlie Chaplin’s iconic Tramp is the spitting image of a rich woman’s drunk husband. At a masked ball, her inability to distinguish one from the other leads to much confusion.
Meshes of the Afternoon draws us into a surrealist slippage of reality, as a woman’s home becomes a shifting landscape of beauty and menace — a place where vivid dreams blur indistinguishably into waking life. Through recurring images and a fractured sense of time and space, her darkest inner desires slowly unfold on screen.
In Joan Jonas’s first autonomous video work, Jonas performs as herself and as her masked double, the character Organic Honey. As a mythic being of Jonas’s own making, Organic Honey expresses numerous ancient and contemporary representational tropes of femininity.
About the series: Through an Open Window
Co-curated by filmmaker Michael Vass and artist GaHee Park, Through an Open Window offers a highly personal survey of cinematic inspirations, as well as a kind of funhouse mirror reflecting various themes and motifs found in Park’s YBCA exhibition GaHee Park: Behind the Curtain.
Some of the films included are direct influences on Park’s paintings, while others provide a more general cinematic parallel to her aesthetic universe, echoing core elements of her practice: layered stories and nested narratives; fantasy and dream sequences; social rituals and taboos; doppelgangers and mistaken identities; voyeurism and theatricality; personae and performance; natural splendour and cocktail charm.
Ranging from silent films to recent releases and spanning several genres and countries of origin, the films featured in Through an Open Window are linked by their psychological sophistication and formal complexity, with a particular focus on the suggestive ambiguities that emerge from the tensions between narrative and pictorial space, which Park explores so memorably in her work.
Join us for more films in the series Through an Open Window
Saturdays, August 15–October 31, 2026, 2 PM
Films
Co-Presented by GaHee Park, Michael Vass & YBCA
Saturday, September 19, 2026, 2 PM
Films
Co-Presented by GaHee Park, Michael Vass & YBCA
Saturday, September 26, 2026, 2 PM
Lead image: Joan Jonas in Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix.
Other film images: Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon. Courtesy of Kino Lorber; Charlie Chaplin in The Idle Class. Courtesy of Janus Films.
YBCA programs are made possible in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Blue Shield Of California, Bob A. Ross Foundation, City and County of San Francisco, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Malia Simonds, Mayor Daniel Lurie, National Endowment for the Arts, Pisces Foundation, The Ron Conway Family, Salesforce, San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, The Svane Family Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy, Yerba Buena Partnership, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Board of Directors and Members.
Exhibitions
In collaboration with the GLBT Historical Society
March 13–August 23, 2026
