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CURRENT EXHIBITION ::::
We Remember the Sun
Opening Reception: Wendesday, June 18, 2008 7:00 - 9:00pm
Exhibition Dates: June 19—September 19, 2008.
Free and open to the public.
Curated by Mary Ellyn Johnson
The opening reception includes a musical performance accompanying Shaun O’Dell’s video Sun October 24th–27th 2002. The performance will attempt to sonically harness the setting sun’s final frequencies on 18 June 2008 and then to hold those tonal forms within the ensemble performance sphere as a remembrance of that day’s sunshine.
The reception will also include a performance by Michael Zheng.
On Thursday, 11 September 2008 at 7:00pm, there will be another performance by L. M. Bogad and Praba Pil.ar
Also beginning in September, a number of film screenings will be presented in tandem with the exhibition (please check back here for further information).
View artist's descriptions
Looking back, forty years in retrospect, on the signal cultural and political moment that May of 1968 marks, We Remember the Sun examines the myths and legends from a time punctuated by activist protests around the globe—protests against, among other things, capitalism, racism, sexism, war, class divisions, rampant unemployment, and the policies of the United States government. There were student uprisings in Brazil, France, Mexico, Senegal, and Spain; the Cultural Revolution in China; the Naxalite movement in India; the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia; and, eventually, such phenomena as the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany. In the US, the civil rights and antiwar movements were in full swing, as were, importantly for We Remember the Sun, the movements of nonviolence and passive resistance that flourished in San Francisco, Berkeley, and throughout California.
Just as quickly, however, a still-continuing backlash began to unfold. In addition to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the seemingly endless war in Vietnam represented a sad and violent articulation of the American hegemonic status quo, which complacently resisted social and political ideals of change and culminated in the elections first of Richard Nixon and then of Ronald Reagan. This incipient reactionary response soon became concerted and aggressive. Today, neoconservative right-wing governments predominate around the world, particularly in the US and Europe (Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland)—a lurid fulfillment of a succession of determined antiprogressive stratagems. Not surprisingly, such right-wing predominance has spawned new forms of extremist opposition from the left—versions of “political correctness” that, like the dogmatism they aim to counter, stridently favor ideological conformity over freedom of expression, whether sociopolitical or artistic.
The works in this exhibition together question how, if at all, the utopian vision, the countercultural zeitgeist, that suffused both local and global realms of progressive thought and action in the late 60s carried over and across to 2008. Beyond the various nostalgias and disappointments, the fabrications and deconstructions, is there a genuine legacy of potential political optimism and action still to be devised and articulated?
Without wanting to foreclose competing logics of response, We Remember the Sun comprises a series of interconnected but individualized comebacks to the question it poses. If Paris was and remains the locus classicus of the unrest of May of 1968, California was and remains the mythical space of utopian possibilities, the goal of a wild and westering impulse promising total freedom, the land of endless seasons of growth in ideal weather. As the exhibition’s title (taken from a work by Shaun O’Dell) implies, however, the “California” conceived of and sought by utopian visionaries not only no longer exists, but, in a certain sense, never did. The longing built in to O’Dell’s quest after the setting sun—a sun that metaphorically represents both California and 60s utopianism—is, ironically, a longing strangely already prevalent in 1968. Rather than indicating another “god that failed,” then, the remembered sun the Golden State enshrines can be seen, especially in the artworld context, as the ongoing unpossessed promise of the social, cultural, and political ideals the transformations of 1968 first taught us to imagine.
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