Originally published in the Marina Times San Francisco in January 2023
San Francisco artist David Ireland’s home has become the site for exhibitions exploring the space as art. Sherman Rio’s exhibition As Above So Below is the final in a series of artists invited to submit proposals for solo exhibitions of new work created in response to David Ireland’s historic home turned installation.
The Bay Area Conceptual Artist Movement and Environmental Art
The 500 Capp Street Foundation has maintained Ireland’s home as an environmental artwork, social sculpture and residence. The collection and archive consists of over 2,500 David Ireland art pieces including painting, sculptures, prints and ephemera of the artist’s work and performances. Additionally, it contains paper and ephemera of the Bay Area conceptual artist movement.
Sherwin Rio lived at the 500 Capp Street home for 10 days in order to develop work for this exhibition. In the spirit of artist-driven participation, Sherwin Rio’s works provide inverse ways of experiencing a house, ideas indebted to the past, the unseen, and the underground. Rio is an interdisciplinary artist addressing colonization, historical public amnesia, and intergenerational storytelling through a Filipinx-American lens. Keeping these influences in mind, his art makes visual metaphors to promote his ideas.
Spaces, History and Symbolism
Rio is inspired by Ireland’s affinity for enclosure and developed an interest in the basement space, a place Ireland called “The Grotto.” The network of pipes and electrical conduit, and their related ambient sounds, are converted into a kind of music. Rio’s sculptural sound installation transmits and amplifies vibrational sounds within the house. Creaking floorboards, movement of doors, the thudding of feet up stairs turns into a kind of kinetic sound sculpture under Rio’s influence. “I see these items–webs of ABS, PVC, unistrut, wood, and conduit–as the veins that bring lifeblood to the house, preserving its ability to function–a need that preceded Ireland and continues into the future,” writes Rio.
Rethinking the Past
In one work Rio opens up the floorboards revealing a hidden stairwell, and extends it in plexiglass into the Solarium room above. Like the basement, the dining room also became a haunted symbol of the unconscious, and the revealing of things concealed. David Ireland traveled extensively during his lifetime and at one point led safari trips in Africa. Problematic photographs, curiosities and objects such as animal trophies from safari travels were placed there by Rio, then the space was filled with household fans. We find ourselves in a new era with changed values, and the circulating air is a symbol of clearing, a cleansing gesture symbolically rectifying the errors of the past. Rio writes, “The work is a critical look at the commodification of nature and culture, dominance and violence as leisure, and a business that profited from and upheld ideas born of settler-colonialism, manifest destiny, and global capitalism.”
Dreaming Myths
In Should the Curve Contain Myth, Legend, Fable or Truth, a curved wall is covered in a ninety degree angled wooden frame, isolating the architecture like a framed work of art. Similarly in A Gesture of Remembrance Part 1 and 2, spotlights point out an almost-forgotten message scribbled on a concrete wall and a pair of worn shoes, missing laces, gently placed on a shelf like treasure. The viewer completes the narrative by imagining the past these discarded signs of life represent. The artist acknowledges the continuing nature of this art project through our collective imaginations in Connecting the Lines: Collaboration is the Only Way Forward. A wooden frame bisects a door to an adjoining room perpendicularly, suggesting the geometry of a framed artwork but also a work in progress, a space still under construction which has yet to be populated by our cooperative enterprise of ideas.
Sherwin Rio has exhibited and performed as a solo and collaborative artist throughout the US in venues such as: de Young Museum, Asian Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Carlsbad Museum of Art. Rio’s many awards include a 2019 Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA.
Free tours of The David Ireland House (including these special exhibitions) are offered Fridays at 2pm and 4pm. Reservations can be made online. Free self-guided, drop-in visits are welcomed on Saturdays 12-5pm without reservations.