Video and Pie in a Laundromat

My other upcoming show is an installation of my video 25th and Mission in the laundromat where it was partially filmed: 25th Street Dry Cleaners, 3416 25th Street (at Mission), San Francisco. The show will be up August 4-10, with an opening reception Wednesday, August 5, 5-7pm (when else can you have wine and cheese and Mission Pie pie in a laundromat)?

The piece looks abstractly at what the four delightfully diverse shops on this block have in common: namely, a rootedness in their community and the work of transforming and beautifying surfaces.

LOCALITY Show in San Francisco April 2-16

My short video 25th & Mission will be in a group show called Locality at the Mission Arts Center, 2183 Mission Street (between 17th & 18th), San Francisco. The opening party is April 2, 8-11pm, and the closing party is April 16, 8-11pm. Unfortunately I won't be there personally.

I made the seven-minute video, which will play in a loop on a monitor, during my first summer of three living in the Bay Area. The piece was inspired by my family's three-week stay at a friend's studio apartment (international tango artist Hung-yut Chen).

What begins as abstract fields of color gradually emerges to be a portrait of four tiny shops in a block of San Francisco’s Mission district. They are as diverse as the community around them: a Chinese-run laundry, a Salvadoran hair salon, a hipster tattoo parlor, an art gallery. As the camera hovers inches from its subjects, we realize that the seemingly disparate shops are linked not only by their location but also by their inhabitants’ loving attention to the beautification of the varied surfaces they work with.