PROJECTS
[PLACEHOLDER] & PHOTO 175
[Placeholder}: Land Acknowledgment was an exhibition created at Verge Center for the Arts by the Sacramento State seniors in photography who took the PHOTO 175 class. It asked questions about relationships to land through quotations, experiential research, and image-making. Click here to see installation views and read the press release.
Peregrine AIR
In the 2022-23 school year, I worked with Peregrine School in Davis to experiment with workshops that help students connect to land. We drew maps of our neighborhoods, designed rituals, walked through campus in each others’ footsteps, identified the plants that grow on campus, and eventually curated a sculpture park at school.
[Placeholder]: florilegia
For this exhibition at Axis Gallery in Sacramento, I brought together the work of Leigh Merrill, Travis Neel & Erin Charpentier, Doug Dertinger, and Chaebin Yoon to illustrate my research and questions around relationships to land, and to showcase the great work all those artists have been doing along similar lines. Each artist’s work represented a line of inquiry that I am excited about. See the show writeup here, and a gallery of installation views here.
[placeholder]
[Placeholder]: a studio visit with Eliza Gregory was an exhibition comprised of my own work, proposals and experiments that demonstrate my current research, and selections of my students' work from the past two years. It took place at Axis Gallery, Sacramento in September 2021.
photo 165: books about place
In the fall of 2021, the seniors in the photography program at Sacramento State created a collaborative artwork about relationships between people and land. Each student was asked to create a volume within a boxed set where they told a story about a person or group of people and their relationship to a specific place. These are selections from that work. PDFs are downloadable, and the printed book or a high res pdf can be purchased via MagCloud—links below. The course was taught by Douglas Dertinger and Eliza Gregory.
strategies for coping
Strategies for Coping is an exhibition that took place at Axis Gallery in Sacramento in December 2020. It asks how people have been dealing with the many challenges of the year, and presents five artists’ works in terms of strategies they have used to cope (including satire, impermanence, and tequila.) Click on the image to take a tour of the installation and access the show catalogue.
where we stand
WHERE WE STAND is a digital exhibition put together by the Special Topics Photography Course at Sacramento State University in the fall of 2020. I taught the course and gave students the task of making work about their own physical relationship to a place. The term was an experiment in collaborative research. Each student designed and executed an independent art project within the brief. We then came together to collaboratively design and create the online exhibition of those works, which you can see at www.photo175.org.
An anti-racist photo history
Photo 15 is a course that was taught for the first time at Sacramento State University in the fall of 2020. Ostensibly a photo history survey course, I adapted it to also discuss the question: What would an antiracist photo historical curriculum look like? Students undertook the dual goal of beginning their study of photographic history while also critiquing the discipline and the textbook as they were presented to them. The term culminated in each student undertaking independent, original scholarship on a group of images. Graphic above by Ashley Bertsche.
PHOTO 165 @ Sacramento State with Doug Dertinger
For the senior thesis course at Sac State in the fall of 2019, co-teacher Doug Dertinger and I asked students to engage in a specific place as a way to research the history, politics, and dynamics of where they are. It was also a tool to help them think more carefully about how each of them relates to places. Through a mixture of collaborative and independent research modalities, students explored the Old River Road, to the west of Sacramento, and staged a pop-up exhibition with their findings in downtown Oak Park.
800 @ the Shrem
In 2017 the Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis asked me to begin developing a proposal to activate their courtyard space. As a part of the research for that work, I developed an audience questionnaire that was distributed at the museum, and helped the museum host a dialogue regarding student social structures and organizations, asking participants to discuss holes in existing student support and strengths and weaknesses in the campus social architecture of student organizations.
the camp washington capsule with Gemma-Rose Turnbull
Wave Pool, a community arts organization in the neighborhood of Camp Washington, Cincinnati, OH approached me to create a project specific to their site for FotoFocus 2018. I proposed and co-developed a community archiving project based on the ideas of Massive Urban Change (2014) which was then fully carried out on site by artist Gemma-Rose Turnbull with me consulting from CA. and resulted in the Camp Washington Capsule, a 500 page book of interviews, photographs and ephemera compiled over 3 weeks in October. The capsule and the digital archive Gemma assembled are now available for any artist to use who comes to Camp Washington and contacts Wave Pool.
TESTIMONY: THE EXHIBITION
The Testimony exhibition opens at the Asian Art Museum on April 5th, 2018 and runs through June 10th. I began this project 3 years ago with a kickoff event as part of the Artists Drawing Club, and now the final phase is an exhibition of portraits and interviews with twelve individuals and families who have immigrated to the Bay Area. The goal of the show is to ask how we might reframe the current dialogue around immigration by zooming out, and looking at multiple mechanisms and reasons for immigration at once, and by zooming in and looking more closely at how various policy decisions are playing out in people's lives. See the museum’s announcement here, and the press release here.
THE TESTIMONY NEWSPAPER
The exhibition includes a free newspaper that you can take with you. It contains extended versions of the interviews, and extra pictures. It also comes apart and can be tacked up as a mini exhibition anywhere you like. It can even become a substrate that students (or anyone) can alter or add onto. Download a pdf of the newspaper here.
PHOTOFUSION UK Residency with GEMMA-ROSE TURNBULL
Gemma-Rose Turnbull invited me to collaborate on her Taking Part Residency, an initiative of PhotoFusion UK. We set up a temporary community-based photographic studio in central Brixton, using portraiture and conversation to explore what that community might want from photography, and what photography wants from that community. The studio occupied the site of the old Mr Biggs family portrait studio, which is now a multi use space, including being Brixton’s first pay-what-you-feel cafe, and the work culminated in an exhibition in February 2018 at PhotoFusion. See a few of the portraits here.
MASSIVE URBAN CHANGE
Massive Urban Change, which was shown at the StorefrontLab in 2014, was a panorama of a 2-mile-long stretch of Mission St. between 15th and 30th Streets, in San Francisco. With design and collaboration from artist Nicole Lavelle, I stretched the image around the gallery space, and used it as a substrate on which to build a community portrait of fears, hopes, stories, history and place-based-identity. The purpose was to shift the polarized and ineffective debate about gentrification in San Francisco to one that could absorb nuance and historical perspective, while also helping individuals discover where they could find their own agency amidst larger social forces. See the full website here.
The Box Project
The Box Project brings children and families into museums to explore relationships between institution & audience, parenting & creativity, sustainability & learning, and brain development & play. City College parenting teacher Nancy Gnass curates a suite of articles focused on early childhood development and is on-site to answer parent questions. Meanwhile a museum ballroom is filled to the brim with used cardboard for families to alter at will, eventually constructing a giant cardboard world. At the end of the day, we destroy it all! Events have taken place at the Portland Art Museum (OR) and the Asian Art Museum (CA). See a video of the 2015 incarnation here.
Art & the Interview
As an Anacapa Fellow at the Thacher School in the Spring Term of 2017, Eliza worked with 9 high school seniors to examine the use of interviews to inform and create artworks. Over the course of the trimester, students conducted interviews with their peers, with faculty children, and with people affiliated with a citrus and avocado ranch that abuts the school's campus. The results were a collaboratively created book about the ranch, and a series of small books that focused on individual interviews by each student.
Adobe Books Backroom Gallery
I curated the Adobe Books Backroom Gallery inside Adobe Books on 24th Street in San Francisco from 2016-2018. I coordinated artists, curators, community members and crafters to show, sell and activate their work in the Backroom Gallery space. I looked for projects that bring people into the space, connect with the fact that it's a bookstore, connect with specific audiences and communities in the city, and reflect diverse perspectives in terms of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, class, artistic approach and medium. The image above is a detail from artist Jason Houck's installation, "Wouldn't you like to?" in August 2016.
Community Arts internship program, Southern Exposure
I was asked to teach the first session of Southern Exposure's revamped after school program for high school students, which would integrate students into a contemporary artists's practice, while also giving them an opportunity to make their own work. After thinking together about ethics, representation, and research in art-making, I asked the students to make work about immigration--from any angle or with any framing they wished to use. I assisted them in realizing their concepts, and we exhibited our work at SoEx in May 2016. I made a book to document the class and exhibition, which you can download as a pd here.
Testimony, Book 1
Testimony began as an invitation from the Asian Art Museum to both create a one-night public program that used the museum as a platform for my work, and to think about how we might co-create a longer term project. So we invited the public into the research I do as part of beginning a large-scale socially engaged work. 10 service providers and professionals whose work touches immigration in some way came to the museum to answer questions from the audience about their jobs. We made a book to document that night. Download it as a pdf here.
One-on-one mentorship
I worked as a mentor in Southern Exposure's one-on-one youth mentorship program for five years, with three different mentees. Pictured above is mentee Grace Leary's piece Just Do It, exhibited at SoEx in 2015 at the end of our third year working together. This is an outstanding program that allows young artists to realize their ideas, pursue the skills they want to acquire, and work toward a public exhibition. This program provides an excellent foil to conventional school environments, because there are no grades, only real-world consequences. You either make the work or you don't, it falls off the wall during the show or it stays up, people respond the way you thought they would or not.
THE LOCAL, Melbourne
THE LOCAL was a participatory photographic project that documented people living in Melbourne, Australia who hail from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, from Indigenous Australian, to white Australian, to Liberian, to Vietnamese, to Italian, to Indian. Each participant had a portrait made in their home, and gave an interview about their own experience of cultural identity and cultural adaptation in contemporary life. The work was exhibited at the Yarra Sculpture Space in Melbourne, and at the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney, both in 2011. See a selection of the portraits from the project here.
Cooking class
This project brought together students from Downtown Continuation High School, SFMOMA, D'Maize restaurant and Mission Chinese Food to talk about food, entrepreneurship and belonging in a fast-changing city. Students received a cooking lesson in each restaurant, focused on a signature dish, and were encouraged to document their experience. I created these learning opportunities, and provided the students with some foundational thinking about how they might document their time in photographs, audio and text. The Downtown Continuation teachers then helped their students reflect on their experiences and compile their documentation images for an exhibition at school. The above image of Gina was made by Andria Lo, courtesy of SFMOMA.
