Make Space

Exhibition Dates: August 23 – October 5, 2014
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 23, 5-8 PM

Berkeley Art Center is thrilled to present Make Space, a group exhibition featuring new and existing work by, Randy Dixon, Nancy Ivanhoe, Tressa Pack, Erik Parra, Dimitra Skandali. This show challenges artists to re-contextualize their art practice within the walls of the Berkeley Art Center; an art space like no other in the Bay Area.

During a time of dramatic economic and cultural shifts in the Bay Area, art spaces are closing, moving and utterly transforming in order to adapt to the changing financial and social changes of the region. However the Berkeley Art Center is a site fixed within Live Oak Park in North Berkeley. What relationship does the site of the Center, situated in a beautiful city park, have to the artwork within it? How can we consider what this art space means and how it functions within the great arts community?

Randy Dixon’s sculptures of unrealized and unrealizable houses and buildings use the language of architecture to lure us into considering how the space around us is constructed. Dimitra Skandali and Nancy Ivanhoe, in addition to showing their own singular sculptures and installations, will be collaborating on a series of line drawings, drawn directly onto the walls, grounds and floors of BAC, that will follow the lines and shadows created by the trees in Live Oak Park beginning at the front entrance of the building and moving throughout the gallery and out to the sculpture garden. Tressa Pack’s photographs of photography equipment set up to light and frame an empty space creates an eerie value system for the ‘spacelessness’ filling up the rest of her compositions. Erik Parra will show new paintings of landscape and domestic interiors situated inside an installation of a room that could easily exist inside his paintings.

BAC executive director, Aimee Le Duc notes, “The artists in Make Space are confronting architecture as both subject and object. They will incorporate Berkeley Art Center into their installations and work – including both the interior and exterior spaces of the gallery. The exhibition is an experiment to test how physical space informs art practice.”

Conversation with Christian Frock and Megan Wilson
Saturday, September 20, 4-6 PM
Christian Frock and Megan Wilson will come together to talk about the recent and rapid changes happening in the Bay Area’s cultural community and how it is effecting housing, work spaces and art making as a whole. Moderated by Aimee Le Duc
Christian L. Frock is an independent writer and curator based in the Bay Area. Frock's practice interrogates the intersection of art, daily life and popular culture through a consideration of art in public spaces. Invisible Venue, the curatorial enterprise founded and directed by Frock since 2005, collaborates with artists to present art in unexpected settings. Megan Wilson is a visual artist based out of San Francisco. Wilson’s large-scale installations and public projects utilize a broad range of pop culture methodologies and aesthetics as a point of entry and engagement for the issues she addresses conceptually.