Take This Hammer: Art + Media Activism from the Bay Area / Samara Golden: A Trap in Soft Division

Samara Golden: A Trap in Soft Division
March 11–May 29, 2016

YBCA presents a new commission by Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden, who creates dreamlike, immersive environments that attempt to stage what she describes as the sixth dimension—a place where the future, present, and past exist simultaneously. The artist says that her works “gesture toward materializing the impossible” through a shared experience between artist and audience. Permeated with raw emotion, her installations use mirrors, video, sound, and handmade sculptures to create a hypnotic, hallucinatory space that draws the viewer in completely.

A Trap in Soft Division is the artist’s largest installation to date. This new project explores isolation in the contemporary era, questioning the status of human connection when we are paradoxically both more in touch and more removed from one another than ever before. Coalescing numerous individual scenes into one cinematic space, the work’s narrative strategy is open, allowing the viewer to navigate multiple vantage points at once. This effect summons a conflicting range of feelings, from comfort to fear. Psychologically stirring and complex, Golden’s monumental installation stages a transformative encounter with a vast unknown.

Golden will give a lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute on Tuesday, March 29 at 7pm as part of the Visiting Artist and Scholars Lecture Series. Co-presented by YBCA and SFAI.

Samara Golden: A Trap in Soft Division is curated by Ceci Moss, Assistant Curator of Visual Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
 

Take This Hammer: Art + Media Activism from the Bay Area
March 11–August 14, 2016

Take This Hammer: Art + Media Activism from the Bay Area reflects on the Bay Area’s unique legacy as a center for social justice movements and considers the ways in which the tools of visual art and performance are amplified via the internet by artists, technologists, and organizers to leverage global public dialogue. Spanning a wide range of media and tactical interventions, and featuring several new site-specific commissions, Take This Hammer complicates conventional narratives around art, activism, and the role of the internet in coalition building, social movement and organizing. It also simultaneously challenges the function of art in daily life, recasting it as a powerful vehicle for public engagement with the most pressing issues of our time.

Using a variety of strategies from painting and printmaking to web-based media and digital visualization, the work in Take This Hammer delves into the role art has to play in expanding the possibilities for engagement and action, the tools at our disposal online, and the powerful social movements coming out of the Bay Area today. The exhibition explores present-day tactical gestures aimed at impacting important social issues, including racial justice, wealth disparity, gentrification, displacement, police brutality, the prison industrial complex, immigration, gun violence, war, and the environment.

Featuring: 3.9 Art Collective, Indira Allegra, Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Bay Area Society for Art & Activism, Cat Brooks with Black Lives Matter | Anti Police-Terror Project, CultureStrike, Dignidad Rebelde, Leslie Dreyer, the Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History, Jeremy Mende, Tucker Nichols, Oree Originol, PERSIA featuring Daddie$ Pla$tik, Pitch Interactive, Adrienne Skye Roberts, Favianna Rodriguez, Ruby Mountain, and Stamen.

Take This Hammer: Art + Media Activism from the Bay Area is curated by Christian L. Frock, independent curator and writer. Public programs are co-curated by Kevin B. Chen, curator and artist. A free full-color publication features newly commissioned essays by Jeff Chang, Christian L. Frock, and Rebecca Solnit.