Conversation 1: Oliver Herring & Tim Sullivan

Curator. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Main Gallery. November 2005 - January 2006.

Conversations is in an ongoing series of two-person exhibitions that explore the relationship between an artist from the Bay Area and an artist from another point on the globe. The intent of this series is two-fold: on an intimate level it allows for a closer look at the production of two individual artists, while it also informs an expansive perspective of how artists from our region relate to an international contemporary art dialogue.

New York-based artist Oliver Herring is making his Bay Area debut. Over the past decade Herring’s live-performances, photographs, sculpture, and video works have often involved extended interactions with strangers. In the North Gallery, are videos from Herring’s ongoing series, BASIC. Beginning in 2002, Herring has periodically invited strangers to work collaboratively to generate “something of interest” while the camera rolls. The resulting documentation takes viewers into the artist’s studio and exposes the creative process. Oliver has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. This exhibition comes close on the heels of his first survey exhibition which was hosted by the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. Oliver is represented by Max Protect Gallery in New York.

Tim Sullivan, a San Francisco-based artist, also utilizes performance, sculpture, video and photography in his practice. For the past few years Sullivan’s work has been influenced by an interest in the work of Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader and his mysterious disappearance at sea in 1975, as well as the life and early death of Joy Division front man Ian Curtis. Presented in the South Gallery, Sullivan’s These Days obliquely references these influences through a disjointed narrative involving an earthquake, a set of books, ripe vegetables, a hovering body, and the sulfurous scent of struck matches. Sullivan holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has also exhibited nationally and internationally.