Reconciling America: Miraculous Encounters with the Mundane

Co-curated with Dana Hemenway and Joyce Grimm. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Main Gallery and Grove St. January - March 2008.

Artists: JD Beltran & Sebastian Bacher, Dina Danish, Jennifer Durban, Richard Haley, Lynn Marie Kirby, Ellen Lake, Brendan Lott, Paul Mullins, Julia Page and Zefrey Throwell.

Reconciling America features works ranging from painting to video to installation and actively explores how artists grapple with, or attempt to reconcile their relationships with America. The American archetype is rooted somewhere in anthems, slogans and amendments – yet under this big blanket where do the lives of average Americans fit in? In our quest to understand and to be understood, new technologies have made it easier to record observations and create personal histories. This is evident in the countless home movies, scrapbooks, blogs and personal web pages created by average Americans. Alternatively, the history of art practice has been deeply rooted in creating individual systems for understanding and documenting various aspects of our complicated world.