Many Places At Once

​CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
April 17 - July 12, 2014
Martin Soto Climent
Rana Hamadeh
Cinthia Marcelle
William Powhida
Li Ran
Ian Wallace
​Real Time and Space
Curated by Kenneth P. Becker, Patricia Cariño, Marion Cousin, Pierre-Francois Galpin, Leila Grothe, Callie Humphrey, Danielle Jackson, Marie Martraire, Lauren R. O'Connell, Marja van der Loo, and Megan Williams
Decades after the “post-studio turn” announced by Conceptual art and Minimalism, this exhibition seeks to reconsider the status of the artist’s studio. Many contemporary artists eschew the traditional studio, producing work on their computers, or directly at the site of exhibition. Some struggle, in an era of eviction and dislocations, to carve out the actual space and time—with its attendant forms of reflection and creativity—that the studio once promised. Others retain a bounded, physical space for making, but one that is transformed by the web, social media, and contemporary conditions of labor. No longer solely a notional interior space of individualistic thought and craft-based making, sovereign and separate from the world, today the studio has become externally focused: a networked media center, a factory, a storage zone, a semi-public showroom.

Many Places at Once presents new commissions and existing works by six international artists and one artist community. The exhibition provides new insights into the nature of contemporary artistic production and the spaces in which it takes place. Taken individually, each work represents a site: a hotel, a notebook, an archive, a network, an event, a community, or a stage. Some works symbolize the studio as a site of private reflection. Others manifest as temporary constellations of objects or people, and yet others operate in the exhibition itself as studios, or as theatrical stages. Together, the works embody the “many places”—both physical and conceptual—that “at once” constitute the reimagined artist’s studio.
DOWNLOAD Exhibition Catalogue

PRESS
Art Business Review, April 17, 2014
SFAQ Pick, April 2014
Art & Education
Dutch Art Institute
This exhibition is made possible through an program of international studio visits, funded by CCA’s Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice. 

Founding support for CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts programs has been provided by Phyllis C. Wattis and Judy & Bill Timken. Generous support provided by Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund and the Curator’s Forum.