“The era of personalization began on December 4th, 2009” declared author Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble​. The date marks the introduction of the patented algorithmic filter Google established to track users online. The filter is designed to predict accurate recommendations in search results and advertisements in correspondence with monitored user preferences online. Tech companies such as Apple and Facebook now employ this personalization filter as third parties to mine individual characteristics and subsequently calculate relevant content. Third Party examines these quantifiable personalized traits rendered in technological systems that purport a sense of individuality and personal growth. Although the individual is central to these transactions, the results one ultimately receives are often one-size-fits all categorizations, and frequently skewed by a Western male perspective. 

Each artwork featured in Third Party ​serves to critique the male gaze evident within personalization filters. The selected artworks question the authority exercised to distinguish individuals through coding, while also investigating who has access to determine economic and informational value through the use of these codes. Not only do the artists employ the use of technology and an online environment to grapple with how one is seen through code, but the artists also directly involve the physical body. In doing so, the individual is reinstated as a priority within an intangible online system that impacts information, objects, and ideas. Third Party establishes a platform to confront the perpetuation of dominant ideologies through methods of algorithmic categorization. 

CTRL + SHFT is a space for hybridization and other forms of experimentations. It contains both artist studios and a white cube for exhibitions. It is also an enterprise run entirely by women artists and curators, and they welcome members of the local and international art community to submit proposals for exhibitions and art exchanges. Funds for this exhibition generously provided by an Alternative Exposure grant from Southern Exposure.

For the second iteration of the college’s biennial series of alumni exhibitions programming, CCA Exhibitions and the CCA Alumni Association will partner to highlight the idea of process within the practices of recent alumni from across the college’s four divisions: Fine Arts, Design, Architecture, and Humanities and Sciences. The exhibition will explore shared threads in artistic practices of sketching, note taking, modeling, mapping, drafting, and rendering. These process-based methods expose the pathways creative individuals depend upon to obtain a final product or idea. By celebrating this amorphousness through the form of an exhibition, Alma Mater: Methods will move beyond what is often exhibited within the white cube—finality, succinct expression, monetary value—and will instead prioritize a thinking-through-making approach that is shared among the college’s creative communities and disciplines. It is here where conversations begin, new connections form, and low stakes are valued. 

This exhibition was co-curated by Beth Abrahamson (MFA Design 2015), Sarah Hobstetter (MArch 2010), Mik Gaspay (MFA 2011), and Tanya Gayer (MA Curatorial Practice, Visual and Critical Studies 2016).

Photos by Nicholas Bruno

Full Disclosure showcases artists from the MFA graduate programs of both the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts as part of a collaboration project, entitled SFiCA. SFiCA’s mission is to pool resources and provide as many opportunities for dialogue, exhibition, and participation as possible to the graduate students of both schools. A natural and necessary coupling, SFiCA’s programs foster a culture of collaboration between artists, curators, designers and writers within the larger Bay Area arts community. The structure of SFiCA’s first event is entitled BREAKOUT. It is similar to a music festival with different events happening on several ‘stages,’ including galleries and artist-run spaces throughout San Francisco and Oakland. BREAKOUT focuses on specific areas of interest under an umbrella theme of institutional critique and collaboration between the two schools, while also highlighting key concerns of current art practices across programs.

One of the many exhibitions occurring during the season of BREAKOUT, Full Disclosure unites artists who explore discourses of text and image by appropriating and manipulating the frameworks of typography, signage, advertisements, and books. This exhibition aims to analyze contemporary visual culture by uncovering the process of seeing language and internalizing it in order to confront ideologies of feminism, identity, consumerism, and race. Full Disclosure exhibits works on paper, sculpture, installations, and spoken word to encourages the viewer to experience aesthetic renderings in place of textual structures to communicate how our generation is seeing the world in a new way.

The opening reception will feature a flash fiction reading by Patrick Newson and Gabriel Edwards.

Ali True responds to elements that reside within a peripheral context. Her use of both weighty and frail materials—such as thread, salt, bronze, glitter and crystals—allows her to highlight architecture, light and sound, and reveal a presence that otherwise remains invisible. Through the intersection of these materials and elements, True encourages her audience to reconsider their account of everyday space and how they choose to interact within it.

True additionally breaks down the hierarchy that can be associated with an exhibition space. Instead of encountering artwork that prevents physical interaction by the use of frames and expensive materials, she presents the viewer with installations that can physically be walked upon or taken inside and outside of the gallery, as with her kaleidoscopes. Her works only become defined in connection to the bodies that activate the space and materials. These interactions found in the gallery function as collaborations or tributes to a site that aid in certain energies amongst viewers and elements alike.

ln the relationship that True initiates for her audience, viewers develop a state of awe for her elements' persona and living presence among us. The combination of pneumatic experiences and breakdown of exhibition space allow for a sense of essence that is found within actions and physical connections. This sense is inherent in our search for inspiration and revitalization, yet only exists within the back of our minds. True eliminates this distinction between body and mind to encourage her audience to see themselves as a sentient agent in the domain of art and everyday space.