Invisible City

Invisible City describes the ways that artists process their surroundings and record an alternate history of their environment through their work, in a relationship that is reciprocal. The exhibition features artists in a push/pull of absorbing, reworking, and representing the world around them.

In the mid-1970s, Cherie Raciti made a series of site-specific paintings during the redevelopment of the South of Market neighborhood. The exhibition contains the ephemera of this artwork: postcards and photographs documenting her large-scale interventions.

From 1978 to 1988, Survival Research Laboratories staged elaborate performances where custom-built machines competed to destroy each other. This work is represented through Mark Pauline’s carefully constructed posters, and by videos of SRL’s performances, ripped from self-published VHS tapes, presented on CRT monitors.

Sahar Khoury incorporates found or rejected objects into sculptures that are reminiscent of the ad hoc arrangements you might find on the side of the road. Like these discarded bed frames and wrought-iron gates, Khoury’s work occupies space inconveniently and cannot be ignored.

Matt Borruso’s arrangements of photographs, scraps, and collages hang on steel sheets covered in black paper, creating fragmented grids of people, places, and things that you can almost remember.

Rose D’Amato’s paintings are like signs for an imaginary bygone city. And Malcolm Kenter’s sculptures of utility boxes and fire alarms pay homage to the Bay Area’s disappearing landscape by rendering objects in our peripheral vision that we failed to notice completely.

There are always multiple versions of a city living alongside each other. But it’s the cleanest narrative that is most often reproduced. The artists in this show remind us that the overlooked, junked, and invisible aspects of city life are just as foundational.