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Urban Legends; A solo exhibition by Reniel Del Rosario – Closing Reception Friday, December 9
December 8, 2022 @ 6:00 pm – December 9, 2022 @ 8:00 pm
Closing Reception; December 9, 5:00 – 7:00 PM PT
BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND
Performance by Emma Lanier and Cauveri Suresh; 6:00 PM PT
more info below
Can’t make it in person? Livestream the performance below
The Museum of Found objects welcomes you to a month of acquisitions, appropriation, art, and antiquity. In Urban Legends, Reniel wants to play with the notion that objects are simply objects. But in a world motivated primarily by markets, they are categorized by value (historical, cultural, and monetary) and some fall through the cracks and are never put on the same pedestals (if at all) as others.
Within these categorizations, objects can be cast off as second-rate or idolized through an exotified anthropological lens. Certainly, some objects will garner cult followings that understand the real merits in time, but until then they exist through those who choose to hold the knowledge of their existence and those who choose to tell the world of them—something short of a myth.
Along with sculptures, a collaboration with San Francisco Bay Area-based dancers Emma Lanier and Cauveri Suresh will be held on November 12th, 2022 throughout the evening. The dancing duo will be performing a movement piece involving works made by Reniel.
Through his body of work made through the Sonoma Ceramics residency, Reniel is not critiquing the artists themselves (for the most part), but how legacies are chosen and erased through almost arbitrary connotations of value through consumer markets, Eurocentricity, and privileges of race, gender, etc. The concept of institutions such as museums and public and/or private collections guiding the public’s tastes and exposure to artwork leads to many blind spots along the way. Many artworks will never be in the limelight to any degree due to a multitude of reasons—lack of immediate popularity, absence of understanding, or no funders being interested.
Whatever the reason, the riff created follows the individual works indefinitely. In the gallery, the artist uses this as an opportunity to combine and clash works from both ends into layered, comical, and albeit confusing combinations that critique the divide amongst objects that institutions build on rather than face and level out.
More on the Performers:
Cauveri Suresh is an artist from the Bay Area. They graduated cum laude from Barnard College in 2018 with a B.A. in dance, and have studied with Joanna Kotze, Jodi Melnick, David Parker, Okwui Okpokwasili, Christina Robson, and Doug Varone among others. Cauveri has performed with Lauren Simpson Dance at Minnesota Street Project, with Kickbal at ODC, and with Leah Samuels at Movement Research. Currently, they work with Risa Jaroslow, Gerald Casel, Emma Lanier, and Ky Frances. Cauveri is also a childcare worker and visual artist. They work with Vibhuti Arya Amirfar as a consultant on workplace equity practices for organizations across the U.S.
Emma Lanier is a choreographer and dance artist who was born and raised in San Francisco. She trained at ODC and went on to study at the Conservatorio Superior de Danza in Madrid, and at Skidmore College in New York, where she was the recipient of the 2016 Margaret Paulding Award for outstanding performance, choreography, and research in critical dance studies. She has presented her work nationally at Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO,) David Zwirner Gallery (New York, NY,) and locally at San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox, Fresh Festival, James Graham Dance Theatre’s Dance Lovers, LevySalon, SAFEhouse for the Performing Arts, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, ODC Pilot71, and Catharine Clark Gallery. As a co-director of Kickbal, she received the 2020 ODC Theater Fleishhacker Opportunity Fund to produce HOMEBODY at ODC Theater in San Francisco. Lanier is also an artist at RoundAntennae, under the mentorship of KT Nelson. In addition to creating, she currently dances for Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works and teaches in the public schools with Performing Arts Workshop.
