Conversation 3: Amy Globus & Cynthia Ona Innis

Curator. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Main Gallery. April - June 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.

In the North Gallery, Amy Globus presents Electric Sheep, a video installation in which an octopus moves through clear plastic tubes and tanks. The creature’s movements are slow and sensuous—tentacles exploring, skin pressing against glass—set to the gravelly voice of Emmylou Harris singing of love and loss in Wrecking Ball. Borrowing its title from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the work questions what is authentic and what is facsimile. Electric Sheep has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Liverpool Biennial.

In the South Gallery, Cynthia Ona Innis debuts her first site-specific installation. Expanding from her paintings, which merge ink, fabric, paper, and paint into biomorphic forms, Innis has created hundreds of pod-like structures that appear to emerge from or sink back into the gallery’s architecture. Rendered in fleshy pinks, reds, browns, and greens, the installation reflects cycles of growth and decay while blurring the line between painting and sculpture. Innis, who earned her MFA from Rutgers University, has exhibited widely, including at Braunstein Quay, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles.