DISMANTLING MONOLITHS
Curated by Jamil Hellu

January 17 - March 25, 2023

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 21, 3-6 pm
Location: Fort Mason Center, Building A

This exhibition is generously supported by Michelle Branch.

About the Exhibition

Artworks

About the Artists

Press

Selected Artworks

Alanna Fields is a New York-based, mixed-media artist and archivist whose work unpacks Black queer history through a multidisciplinary engagement with photographic archives. Fields contributes mixed-media collages that pull from photographic archives depicting Black queer people from the 1920s and on, repositioning the imagery and her subjects into the present, while honoring the lively gestures, expressions, and records she uncovers.

Fields’ work has been exhibited at The High Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, MoCADA, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Baxter St. CCNY, Expo Chicago, Felix Art Fair in LA, and UNTITLED Art Fair in Miami. Fields is a Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar and has participated in residencies at Silver Arts Projects, Light Work, Baxter St. CCNY, and Gallery Aferro. She received her MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute and is a Lecturer of Photography at Howard University. Fields has given artist talks at the Aperture Foundation, Light Work, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Parson's New School, Syracuse University, and Stanford University. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Aperture Magazine, FOAM Magazine, and The Atlantic amongst others. Fields lives and works between Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Follow Alanna on Instagram: @alannafields

Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist from the US and Mexico border of El Paso and Juarez. Through commanding gestures and positionality, her video work Turn Around Sidepiece references those canonized as side pieces throughout the history of art: the subjects of nude art paintings made by Gauguin, Manet, and Bouguereau.

Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Broad Museum (LA), ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico), The Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC), ONE Archives (LA) and Anderson Collection (Stanford) to name a few.  Recent residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, Open Space SF MOMA (Columnist in Residence), Marble House Project, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, National Performance Network, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has been awarded the Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship, Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, Eisner Film and Video Prize,  Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award.  Her work has been featured in Artforum, Paper Magazine, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, ArtNews and in various academic journals nationally and internationally. 

Follow Xandra on Instagram: @lachicaboom

Tarrah Krajnak is an Oregon-based artist represented by Galerie Thomas Zander in Cologne, Germany, working across photography, performance, and poetry. In her eighteen, archival print series, Master Rituals II: Weston's Nudes, Krajnak makes clear reference to the history of photography, on the one hand, and to the artist’s identity as a Latin-American woman, on the other. She re-enacts Edward Weston’s famous Nudes (shot starting in 1927, and published as a unified work in 1977) and replays a significant chapter in the history of photography while re-focusing on the role of the female model.

Krajnak is the recipient of the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles, and a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies. Her book El Jardín De Senderos Que Se Bifurcan was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo First Book Award in 2021 and named to MoMA's inaugural list of ten photo books of the year. Krajnak’s photographs are held in numerous collections including the Centre Pompidou, Museum Ludwig, and the Pinault. Her work has been published and reviewed in Aperture, Artforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles among others. Krajnak’s work is supported by a 2022 Howard Foundation Fellowship and a Lewis Baltz Research Fund Award. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Oregon, and an artist-in-residence with Unseen California. She currently lives and works between Eugene, OR and Los Angeles, CA.

Follow Tarrah on Instagram: @tarrahkrajnak_studio

Forrest McGarvey is an artist and writer based in the Bay Area. His digital collage series New Works reflects on the performance of identity, presenting questions about ownership and legibility within the omnipresence of technology. He uses screenshots and found online images depicting the history of the Pacific, cultural iconography, product and stock imagery to create still lifes and portraits influenced by his experiences as a mixed-race queer person. 

His work has been featured as both an artist and a writer in multiple print publications and exhibitions across the Pacific Northwest. He received an MA in Visual and Critical Studies and an MFA in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts. Forrest also holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. 

Follow Forrest on Instagram: @forroost

Marcel Pardo Ariza is an Oakland-based, trans visual artist, educator, and curator, represented by OCHI Gallery in Los Angeles. Ariza explores the relationship between queer and trans kinship through constructed photographs, site-specific installations, and public programming. Their practice celebrates collective care and intergenerational connection and is invested in creating long term interdisciplinary collaborations and opportunities that are non-hierarchical and equitable. 

Their work has recently been exhibited at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Palo Alto Art Center; San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Palm Springs Art Museum; and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. 

Ariza is the recipient of the 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award, the 2021 CAC Established Artists Award; the 2020 San Francisco Artadia Award; 2018-19 Alternative Exposure Grant; 2017 Tosa Studio Award; and a 2015 Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award. Ariza is a studio member at Minnesota Street Project, and the co-founder of Art Handlxrs*, an organization supporting queer, BIPOC, women, trans and non-binary folks in professional arts industry support roles. They are currently a lecturer at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University, and based in Oakland, CA

Follow Marcel on Instagram: @marcelpardoa

Aaron Turner is an Arkansas-based artist. He uses photography as a transformative process to understand the ideas of home and resilience in two main areas of the U.S., the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. Throughout his series Black Alchemy, Turner responds to internal questions about identity, representation, and the artists' role in the studio space. 

Aaron received his M.A. from Ohio University and an M.F.A from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He was a 2018 Light Work Artists-in-Residence at Syracuse University, 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, a 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space Artists-in-Residence, a 2020 Artist 360 Mid-America Arts Alliance Grant Recipient, the 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship Recipient, a 2021 Creators Lab Photo Fund recipient from Google's Creator Labs & the Aperture Foundation, and 2022 Darryl Chappell Foundation photographer-in-residence at Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Follow Aaron on Instagram: @aturn_arkdelta

Through a multidisciplinary art practice that spans photography, video, and site installations, Jamil Hellu’s work focuses on themes of identity, visibility, and cultural heritage, while expressing a shift towards a world beyond binaries. Navigating from a personal lens, his projects weave together strategies of performance and photographic representation to point to the tensions found in the evolving discourse about sexuality.     

Born in Brazil, Hellu holds a Masters in Fine Arts in Art Practice from Stanford University and a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. His projects have been discussed in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Artforum, and VICE. He is the recipient of the San Francisco Art Commission Artist Grant, Zellerbach Family Foundation Community Grant, Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, and the Kala Art Institute Fellowship Award.   

Hellu has held art residencies at the San Francisco Recology Artist-in-Residence Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Public collections holding his work include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Cantor Center for Visual Arts, CA; Colorado Photographic Arts Center, CO; and Blanton Museum of Art, TX.     

He is a Photography Lecturer in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. An active member in the San Francisco Bay Area arts community, Hellu serves as an advisory board member for Recology’s Artist-in-Residence Program.   

His work is represented by Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco.