Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Queen's Nails Annex





Exhibition: Secret of the Ninth Planet
Gallery: Queens Nails Annex
Exhibition Dates:April 24-May 24, 2009
Address: 3191 Mission Street, San Francisco


"The Secret of the Ninth Planet is the 2009 final thesis exhibition presented by students in the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

The show takes its title from a 1959 Donald A. Wollheim novel of the same name. In the book, evil colonialist curators display in vitrines captured members of various intergalactic cultures. Operating counter to this model of the curator as authoritarian cultural anthropologist, CCA's nine graduate student curators focus instead on works that deal in one way or another with ideas of time, space, and travel. The featured artworks are in a variety of media, from video and sound installations to (in the artist Suzanne Treister's words) "delusional, time-traveling watercolors." The galleries are illuminated not by overhead lighting, but by light emitted from the works themselves.

The metaphor of liberation extends as well to the show's organizational premise. As opposed to the traditional concept of an exhibition as a zone of stable definition and order, The Secret of the Ninth Planet is united, somewhat paradoxically, by a disavowal of order. The dual-venue installation is also a deliberate attempt to offer expanded possibilities for interpretation of the works' layered content. "



Artists in the exhibition: Raymond Boisjoly, Chu Yun, Jasmina Cibic, Maryam Jafri, Yael Kanarek, Kitty Kraus, Gabriel Lester, Euan Macdonald, Gianni Motti, Kamau Patton, Dario Robleto, Sham Saenz, Tokihiro Sato, Suzanne Treister, Matt Volla, and Hillary Wiedemann.

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