Lucky Day
Curator. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Main Gallery. January - March 2007.
Artists: Michael Anderson, Gretchen Bennett, Spencer Finch, Euan Macdonald, Chris McCaw, Daniel Tierney, Claude Zervas
In the song Lucky Day, Tom Waits sings about returning home, only to find that the place he remembers no longer exists as it once did. Each artist in this exhibition has had their own “lucky day”: an encounter that prompted them to seek, collect, and record fragments of a specific place. At the center of each work is a translation of site—mediated through light, memory, and time—that speaks to the shifting relationship between observation and experience. Together, the works offer poetic reflections on how we perceive and reimagine the world around us.
Light and the passage of time. In Lucky Day, light becomes both subject and measure. Chris McCaw (San Francisco) positions handmade cameras directly toward the sun, producing images marked by scorched paper and ghostly shadows—photographs that literally record the sun’s force while capturing the feel of place. Spencer Finch (New York) traces light’s subtler shifts, sitting for sixteen hours in a meadow to document the changing color of trees, rocks, and a dragonfly. His drawings chart how light reshapes perception across time, turning observation into memory.
Memory and transition. Gretchen Bennett (Seattle) reconstructs Brooklyn landmarks from an archive of collected stickers, memorializing sites she once knew yet recognizing their transformation through urban development. Claude Zervas (Seattle) photographs forest edges where old growth meets new, then subjects the images to a digital process that slowly degrades and reconstitutes them. The cycle reflects both the instability of landscapes and the shifting terms of memory itself.
Seeking and finding. Michael Anderson (Denver) searches for the natural counterparts of television color bars, locating exact hues in desert skies and snowy peaks. His process links mediated image and lived experience, painting landscapes through a live video feed once a match is found. Euan Macdonald (Los Angeles) sets out to film a sunset from a helicopter, only to discover meaning not in the fading sun but in dusk itself—the earth’s shadow spreading across the landscape. His nine-minute video captures that moment of transition, when seeking gives way to finding.
Selected Press
SF Gate, Reyhan Harmanci, January 25, 2007
"The places in question are of wildly varying size. Seattle artist Gretchen Bennett created images of remembered bits of grass and foliage in her old Brooklyn street. "Her work has to do with her memory of places now gone, the natural environment within the urban areas. Specific trees, specific patches of grass, tiny urban refuges that she is nostalgic for," she says."