Old Sun, New Sun
July 8 - August 12, 2023
620 Kearny St. San Francisco
Et al.
July 8 - August 12, 2023
620 Kearny St. San Francisco
Et al.
Michael Bala
Y. Malik Jalal
Sahar Khoury
Brandon Ndife
Umico Niwa
Gozié Ojini
Peter Simensky
Jeff Williams
Curated by Andrew Sungtaek
The sun exists within a funny contradiction of time. It takes around eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach the earth. So in that sense, what we experience has already happened, while the sun as it exists now remains somewhere beyond us, yet to be perceived, guiding our trajectory with its gravitational pull. We are bound to something whose present we cannot see, just as our future remains shaped by a past that continues to act upon us.
We use the sun as a measure of time, and time as a measure of change. So how might we shape change, and what might tomorrow hold?
Old Sun, New Sun brings together a group of artists who engage the physical world around us in a new light, employing inventive approaches to draw out latent potentials, histories, and relations embedded within our material world. Through familiar objects, materials, and forms, their works consider how histories continue to shape the present, and how what already exists might be transformed, reconfigured, or understood otherwise.
The exhibition title Old Sun, New Sun derives from an epigram found in drafts of Octavia E. Butler’s unfinished sequel Parable of the Trickster. The exhibition forms a small ripple within the continuing reverberations of Butler’s work, considering how something new might emerge from a world that is already here.
There is nothing new
under the sun,
but there are new suns.
— Octavia E. Butler
Installation view (basement level)
Umico Niwa
Family Staircase Series: Extended Love,2022
Forage organic matter, electroplated copper
Umico Niwa
Family Staircase Series: Extended Love,2022 (detail)
Forage organic matter, electroplated copper
Umico Niwa
Family Staircase Series: Extended Love,2022
Forage organic matter, electroplated copper
Installation View (Basement Level)
Goziè Ojini, Borrowed Breath, 2023, Altered Brass, copper pennies, tin solder
Gozié Ojini
Untitled (Exhale), 2023
Trumpet, rubber hose, altered case, regulator, steel tank
Installation View (Basement Level)
Brandon Ndife
Two Blacks, 2018 (detail)
Cast foam, rubber
40 x 12 x 8 inches
Michael Bala
Hanger (No.4), 2022
Maple baseboard, oil stain, electrical wire, leather, metal, magnets
60 x 6 x 1 inches
Upper floor (installation view)
Y. Malik Jalal
Let me hold something (1 & 2), 2023
Found automotive floor mats, forged steel, found photography, acrylic
20 x 30 inches
Y. Malik Jalal
Let me hold something (1 & 2), 2023
Found automotive floor mats, forged steel, found photography, acrylic
20 x 30 inches
Sahar Khoury
Untitled (holder of Lynne Hershman Leeson's plexiglas and Sarah Braman's glass), 2019 (detail)
Glazed ceramic, plexi glass, steel, glass, leather, white glue
18 x 40 x 17 inches
Sahar Khoury
Untitled (holder of Lynne Hershman Leeson's plexiglas and Sarah Braman's glass), 2019 (detail)
Glazed ceramic, plexi glass, steel, glass, leather, white glue
18 x 40 x 17 inches
Sahar Khoury
Untitled (holder of Lynne Hershman Leeson's plexiglas and Sarah Braman's glass), 2019 (detail)
Glazed ceramic, plexi glass, steel, glass, leather, white glue
18 x 40 x 17 inches