San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Binta Ayofemi: ‘Continuum’
Binta Ayofemi grew up in Brooklyn and received her master of fine arts degree from Stanford University in 2007. Inspired by movements including the Black Panther Party, Black Shakers and Afrofuturism, her work includes performance, ensemble dance and music, forming what she calls multisensory “urban scores.” They have been featured at the Oakland Museum of California, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum. She is also the recipient of the Public Artist Award in Oakland and the YBCA 10 Artist Award.
Her practice frequently explores the impact of redlining and redevelopment on Black communities and how those spaces can be regenerated. What’s on view: The spacial installation in the Floor 2 Learning Lounge seeks to “retune” the museum. Ayofemi considers the cities of Oakland and San Francisco her primary medium and canvas, and frequently uses abandoned and overlooked sites to honor Black and Indigenous presence.
“Continuum” uses materials including tinted mirrors and a corrugated metal wall, large blocks of wood and tree stumps, as well as a video installation mixing found and shot footage set to Alice Coltrane’s 1971 song “Journey In Satchidananda.”
In the artist’s words: “The big inspiration for me was this idea of the atmosphere or a portal, and what if the building would freeze? How can we actually acknowledge Black, Indigenous space and the fact that so many of these buildings in the South of Market area, these fortresses, are based on the parcel line, and the parcels that were created from redevelopment?
I wanted to negotiate and transform some of the acknowledgment,
and then the sense of breathing through that and ask: How could a building breathe were it to acknowledge all these things? I think that immersion is an act of radical imagination. What would it be like if certain notes, certain colors, certain presences that are unacknowledged would literally shift the building and resonate?”
On SECA: “The curators were amazing at delving into our practices and acknowledging how each of us are holding space. In the work that I’ve been doing, I’ve been playing
with that idea. I felt like the galleries themselves show that each of us was holding space for a certain frequency or a certain imagination. It was a really profound experience to see everything come together.
This show, I don’t think it’s really finished yet. There’s some other level of dialogue that is emerging out of this. I see our work as united in regards to a kind of invitation. It’s an invitation to go deeper, to let our imaginations be their own language and to speak within that language.”
Maria A. Guzmán Capron was born in Milan. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2015 and her bachelor of fine arts from the University of Houston in 2004. Her exhibitions in the Bay Area include a solo show at Premier Junior in San Francisco and group exhibitions at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Berkeley Art Center and NIAD Art Center in Richmond.
Bodily forms and patchwork motifs often recur in her work, as do explorations of class, gender and awareness of a material hierarchy.
What’s on view: “Respira Hondo” tells the story of a giantess descended from the ceiling whose presence turns the gallery into a colorful surreality. Among the plush sculptures covered in remnant and mass market fabrics are the giantess’ foot, her two-sided face propped up by its long strands of hair — each eye with two pupils — and wall-mounted figures meant to reflect further ideas of duality.
“I was thinking more of an internal inner world and bringing that out to be exposed in some way. The giantess, Mucho Mas, she’s coming from somewhere else, from the world above us, entering our reality, stepping into it. I wanted that step to be felt, to be threedimensional and have weight. From what I hear, people seeing the show really make a
In the artist’s words:
connection with the bodily weight of it, the fabric and the size. It was about that and then having the other pieces kind of as pillars of this world in which Eros, Danza and Luna all had a job in some way. Eros to emanate love and care, Danza to bring in a sense of rhythm and joy, and Luna to keep track and to store time.
All of these elements come together in this soft panel of color to create an atmosphere, an experience more than just objects on the walls.”
On SECA: “I think of my practice as a continuous search to represent identities … and for everyone that’s being seen as other to find power in that otherness. This group has that diversity within it, and that’s what makes me feel good and makes me feel comfortable to be in the spaces and galleries. I feel at home and I feel seen. I hope that all the people who come here can see themselves too within any of these spaces.”