A Thin Line: Extinction, Survival, Transformation

Exhibition now through August 31, 2011, gallery hours Wed - Friday, 2-6pm or by appointment

...there's a thin line between the inside and the outside, a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone..., wrote David Wojnarowicz, the late artist/activist/writer. Curated by Julie Blankenship, the works exhibited in A Thin Line are reminders of the American experience of this thin line in the early years of AIDS.

Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992, is represented by his famous photograph of three buffalo stampeding over a cliff. Actually an image of a diorama, the toy-like quality of the piece mingles aspects of horror and intimacy. Rise and fall and impending disaster find expression in other works.

David King's collages composed of cutouts of gems are assembled into a mysterious triptych. The title Elysium invites us to ask who is a hero? What does it mean to die heroically? The intricate chains of rubies and pearls, the diaphanous folds of white dots create the sensation of having entered another dimension where we consider death on other levels- the molecular, or the imaginary architectures of heaven.

James Baldwin Lecture, Philip Zimmerman's assemblage, functions as both archive and memorial. Encased in plexiglass, a book filled with gold-hued Polaroids, love letters and other ephemera relating to his late partner, this work resembles something found in a magician's cabinet. His work is a widower's constellation of reveries and memories- an eerie homage to "The One" first found and finally lost.

Finally Daniel Goldstein is represented by sculptures that are coverings of workout equipment from the old SF Muscle System, a gay male gym. Mysterious, figurative shapes were worn into the leather from the friction and sweat of anonymous bodies. Invisible Man is a mobile made of 800 hypodermic syringes, tipped with red crystals. The steel wire from which the cascades of needles hang reminds the viewer of how fragile, indeed how thin are the lines of life that hold the human being in place.