Artists: ASMA, Elizabeth Corkery, Nicki Green, Greg Ito, Rhonda Holberton, Brook Hsu, Alison O’Daniel, Lara Ögel, Woody De Othello, Susanne M. Winterling
Curators: Collective Çukurcuma (Hakkı Serhat Cacekli & Naz Cuguoğlu)
Venue: fused space, 1401 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
Opening Date: October 3, Thursday, 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates: October 3-25, 2019

The garden is, was, and will always be a place of possibility. Not only as a space of collaborative systems, between species and inanimate objects, but also as a place of imagination and resistance. It can be seen as a hole that opens up to another universe, be it sci-fi or good old storytelling. It is sort of a mindset: you can’t choose it, it chooses you. And it will choose you. It is a matter of what you do when the next supernova takes place. Will you go after the raccoon, cut roses to decorate the dinner table, or will you daydream about the seeds hiding under the ground and wonder who put them there? Your camouflage as a colonizer in relation to the invisible seed contradicts with your existence as an exile, voluntarily or involuntarily. Will you let your plants cross-breed, let the moss go wild, or will you cut a hundred-year-old tree in a botanical garden because it was not documented in the archives?

Coming from a place in which public spaces have ceased to exist, it is safe to linger towards the private, intimate, and personal. It is a tendency to create a moment to meditate on what is missing from the memory of a city that never was, to heal. Because it is not just about a garden in San Francisco; there are many more far away that haunt you at night. Name it Gezi or Collective Cukurcuma , these collaborative ecosystems are meant to keep you awake in the age of (self)doubt and systematic nonsense.

Spend the night in your garden, hug the chthulucene—baby octopus, ladybug, and the raccoon—turn around, cut the moon in half, and eat it.

Nobody knows, it did not happen.

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“Sanctuary” is a meditation on our back garden in San Francisco. It is an attempt to learn from plants, mushrooms and moss. Zooming in and out, looking for our reflection in the pond, trying to find our way through the labyrinth. Far from a recreation, each work acts as an allegory to understand our relation to informal gardens and their habitat, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, human and non-human, to wither and to flourish.

Hakki & Naz

Left: Woody De Othello, See through, 2019, Wood, paint, resin and ceramic, 85 x 48 x 3 inches
Right: Greg Ito, The Hunt, 2019 & The Recluse, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches

Artist Bios:

ASMA is an artist duo formed by the Ecuadorian artist Matias Armendaris (b. 1990) and the Mexican artist Hanya Belia (b. 1994) based in Mexico City. They have exhibited internationally including The Chicago Artist Coalition (USA), Galería Sankovsky (São Paulo), Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Quito (Ecuador), XIV Bienal de Cuenca (Ecuador), Mx Gallery (NY, USA), Access Gallery (Canadá), Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro (México). They received the Premio Brasil Awards to do a Residency at Pivô Arte e Pesquisa in São Paulo. The duo has participated in various international Art Fairs including ArtLima (Perú), Material Art Fair (México) Zona MACO (México) ArteBA (Argentina), Artissima (Italy) and CHACO (Chile) where they received the Coleccion CASA award to the best booth in the emerging section. They both received an MFA in the Painting and Drawing Department from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a full merit scholarship (The New Artist Scholarship Award). Armendaris holds a BFA in drawing and printmaking from Emily Carr University with both an entrance merit scholarship and The Christopher Foundation Scholarship, and Belia holds a BFA in Visual Arts from the Facultad de Artes y Diseño de la Universidad Autónoma de México (FAD – UNAM). They are recently nominated for the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) Grants and Commissions Program, 2020.

Elizabeth Corkery (b. 1986) lives and works in Sacramento, California. Born in Sydney, Australia, she moved to the United States after completing her BFA in Printmaking at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney, Australia. She received her MFA from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. She has been artist-in-residence at the Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, Belgium; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; and The Slade, UCL, London, UK. She has received production and research funding in the US from Brooklyn Arts Council, The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, as well as Australian philanthropic organizations The Australia Council, The Dame Joan Sutherland Fund and The Ian Potter Cultural Trust. Corkery has presented in solo and group exhibition at venues around the world, such as Beers Contemporary, London, UK; Telfer Gallery, Glasgow, UK; First Draft Gallery, Sydney, AU; Tower Hill Botanic Gardens, Boylston, MA; and Outside Gallery, North Adams, MA, among others. She is also the Founder/Director of the international printmaking collaborative and publisher, Print Club, Ltd.

Nicki Green is a transdisciplinary artist working primarily in clay. Originally from New England, she completed her BFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and her MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. Her sculptures, ritual objects and various flat works explore topics of history preservation, conceptual ornamentation and aesthetics of otherness. Green has exhibited her work internationally, notably at the New Museum, New York; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Rockelmann & Partner Gallery, Berlin, Germany; [ 2nd floor projects ], San Francisco. She has contributed texts to numerous publications including a recent piece in Duke University Press’ Transgender Studies Quarterly and a piece in Fermenting Feminism, Copenhagen. In 2019, Green was a finalist for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA Award. She is also the recipient of a 2018 Graduate Fellowship from Headlands Center for the Arts, and of a 2019 Arts/Industry Residency from the John Michael Kohler Center for the Arts, among other awards. Green lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Greg Ito (b. 1987, Los Angeles) received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. Current exhibitions include an exhibition at The Drake Hotel (Toronto). Upcoming exhibitions include Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles), Weiden + Kennedy (Portland), Fused Space by Jessica Silverman (San Francisco), and Maake Magazine (Yucca Valley). Ito was awarded a residency at The Macedonia Institute (Hudson Valley, NY) in 2020 with Mario Ayala. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Garden at Penske Projects (Los Angeles), A Swamp Tale at No Place Gallery (Columbus, OH), Enchantment at Galerie Division (Montreal) and Arsenal Contemporary (Toronto), Lullaby at Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago), and Soothsayer at Steve Turner (Los Angeles). Recent group exhibitions include Smart Objects (Los Angeles), OCHI Gallery (Ketchum, ID), Five Car Garage (Los Angeles), Jeffrey Deitch (New York), Shulamit Nazarian (Los Angeles), Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago), Romer Young (San Francisco), 315 Gallery (Brooklyn), and MON CHÉRI (Brussels).

Rhonda Holberton holds a MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from California College of the Arts. Her multimedia installations make use of digital and interactive technologies integrated into traditional methods of art production.  In 2014 Holberton was a CAMAC Artist in Residence at Marnay-sur-Seine, France, and she was awarded a Fondation Ténot Fellowship, Paris. Her work is included in the collection of SFMoMA and the McEvoy Foundation and has been exhibited at CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, FIFI Projects Mexico City; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, SF; Berkeley Art Center; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Holberton taught experimental media at Stanford University from 2015-2017 and is is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Media at San Jose State University. She lives and works in Oakland.

Brook Hsu (b. 1987, Pullman) Lives and works in New York. Hsu received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University, New Haven in 2016. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Renaissance Society (IL), Bahamas Biennale (MI), BBQLA (CA), Deli Gallery (NY), Double Double Land (Toronto, Canada), Carrie Secrist Gallery (IL), Galleri CC (Malmo, Sweden), GRIN Contemporary (RI), In Lieu (CA), Page (NY), Vacant Farm (MO), Vernon Gardens (CA) and Et al. (CA).

Alison O’Daniel (b. 1979) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles working across sound, narrative, sculpture, installation and performance. Her projects, screenings, and performances have been included in Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum; The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Anthology Film Archives, New York, and Art Los Angeles Contemporary. Solo exhibitions include Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Art In General, New York; Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles; Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France, among others. She is a recent recipient of a 2019 Creative Capital Award. O’Daniel received her BFA from Cleveland Institute of Art and MFA from University of California, Irvine. She will join the faculty of the California College of the Arts this fall.

Lara Ögel (b. 1987, Izmir, Turkey) lives and works in Istanbul. Ögel works in a variety of mediums from video, sculpture and works on paper to create site and context aware works. She is interested in site specificity and context specificity. Her wide range of production develops from a personal perspective and embodies larger universal concerns, often highlighting the vernacular of our time by using found objects and images and expending their contexts. She received her BA in Screen Studies from Clark University in Worcester, MA. Ögel attended the Intensive Summer Foundation at Slade School of Fine Art in London. She’s participated in artist residencies in PRAKSIS (Oslo) and Beirut Art Residency (Beirut). She’s shown works in Istanbul, Beirut, Hasselt, Paris, Leipzig, Basel, Athens, Porto, New York and Amsterdam, and her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, ArtUnlimited, amongst others.

Woody De Othello (b. 1991 Miami) completed his MFA at the California College of Arts in San Francisco in 2017. He received his BFA from Florida Atlantic University with a concentration in Ceramics. Othello has exhibited widely in group exhibitions, including the recent FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial (2018) and the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial in Slovenia (2019). His work is on permanent view at the San Francisco International Terminal. In November 2019, Othello will have his first solo museum show at the San Jose Museum of Art. He is represented by KARMA in New York and Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. Othello lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Susanne M. Winterling (b. 1970) lives and works in Berlin and Oslo. She is an interdisciplinary artist who received her MFA from Meisterschulerin and is a former member of Hamburg collective Akademie Isotrop. Between 2012 and 2014 Winterling held a Goethe Institute residency in Caracas. She has had numerous gallery and museum solo exhibitions throughout the U.S. and Europe. Recently Winterling has been part of exhibitions at Kunstverein (Amsterdam), Lulu (Mexico City), Friedericianum (Kassel), GAK (Bremen) and Hiromi Yoshii Ropongi (Tokyo). Recent exhibitions and projects include Gravitational currents and the life magic, Empty Gallery HongKong; Barents spectacle, Kirkenes; Myths of the Marble, HOK Oslo and ICA Philadelphia; An Inventory of Shimmers, MIT List Boston, Contour Biennale 2017; Sitevisit, Kunstverein Freiburg; Complicity, Kunstverein Amsterdam; Tidalectics, tba 21 Vienna and MoMa Dubrovnik; Variations on time, Karma Ltd. Extended; Between Bodies, Henry Art Museum University of Washington, Luleåbiennalen 2018.