Category: window installation

THE S.S.S.S.S.S, in uneasy partnership with James Bradley,
PRESENT:

“OBAMA TRAUMA”

The Secular Society of Self-Satisfied Satan Sympathizers, also known as the S.S.S.S.S.S, also known as the Sextuple S, is pleased to present an installation honoring a man whom, in the short period of time spanning no more than the past year and a half, has done much to further our aims, which are far from modest, and whom we have come to regard as the personification of our values and of our character, and of the general character of the New Man of the coming New Age. This exemplary man is none other than the 44th president of these United States of America, the leopard with four wings and four heads, the man who has obligingly nicknamed his presidential limousine “the Beast,” Barack Hussein Obama.

In addition, we offer this installation as a remedy to the unfortunate outcome of Super Bowl XLIV, in steadfast hope that the next time around it will be the Horsemen who emerge victorious against any so-called Saints who oppose them.

Towards the day in which every man and every woman is a member of the S.S.S.S.S.S!

Forty-four thanks,

S.S.S.S.S.S.
San Francisco Chapter

and

James Bradley

James Bradley is an artist living and working in San Francisco. For more information, please visit:http://registry.whitecolumns.org/view_artist.php?artist=11157.

“My art practice has taught me that as much as I love and need time to geek out in by private space, I want shows and projects to be an opportunity to collaborate with a portion of the infinitely inspiring community around us. For this project, I visited Kim Allen of Berkeley Youth Alternatives’ Youth Garden for some advice and walked away with pockets full of seeds planted for this project. Gabriel Varney, a Greenhouse Technician for UC Berkeley, helped source irrigation and lighting materials, and lent his knowledge and skills. Brent Bucknum, my main eco/art design/build partner (and founder of Hyphae Design Laboratory), has been giving general moral, technical, and design support. Johanna Silver Test Garden Master-bebe at Sunset Magazine has made containers and seeding possible. Come to the closing party and take home a plant of your own to commune with!”

Please join us this Sunday afternoon for the opening reception of Robin Johnston’s window installation, Keeping Count. Stop by to meet the artist and enjoy light refreshments.

“Body counts. Counting blessings. Accounting for, and the unaccountable. Counting picks up the pieces. The account, where counting becomes recounting — numbering becomes telling. Counting is a rhythm, like rocking. Counting restores an order, the simplest order of all, of things in a row. Counting operates between one — the merged — and infinity — the emergency. Counting is about an increase in quantity without an increase in scale: more of the same. It takes an event beyond the scale of the senses and makes it knowable…” (Rebecca Solnit, from the essay “Landscapes of Emergency”)

Keeping Count acts as a memorial, a calendar, and a record. Beginning in March 2003, represented here in March 2010, and advancing into the foreseeable future, the installation illustrates collected data of casualties in the Iraq war. Each day is represented by a string: a knot for every recorded fatality. For many Americans, a disconnect exists between the remote events taking place in Iraq and the underlying effects they have on our daily lives. However, there is an invisible weight pulling on us each day that the conflict continues. Filling a window with knots that represent this immense loss is an attempt to come to terms with the abstract reality of war and a way to access grief.

Keeping Count makes reference to the quipu, an Incan recording device that used knots to represent events and manage accounts. In this complex system, red string represented “blood” or “war”. Additionally, prayer beads and rosaries used in various religious practices originated from tying knots to keep track of recited prayers. This piece was created along those lines, with a prayer and a spirit of respect and reverence for those who have suffered; the knots accumulate to become a rosary, each knot a meditation on one life lost. Throughout the month, Johnston will go on tending, maintaining, and caring for the count, adding threads as new data becomes available.

Robin Johnston is an artist living and working in San Francisco. For more information, please visit: http://www.robin-johnston.com