MATRIX

MATRIX, curated by Tracy Ren, centers the collective learning, healing and dreaming of artists who deviate from hegemonic norms. The exhibition is an invitation to these artists to create, heal, nourish themselves and one another, dream of prospective futures, and exhibit their works without descriptive constraints or limitations. The exhibition also invites the audience to participate in this healing and dreaming, fostering a culture of care and exchange between and across communities.

The artists featured in MATRIX are diverse in their approaches, each possessing highly nuanced and multivalent practices that draw from a wellspring of deep personal wisdom. What they have in common is the desire to connect—to themselves, to others, and to the world at large. They lovingly create entirely new languages with which to speak through a poetry of material, space, and action. 

Maryam Safanasab conjures a space of hybrid geographies constituted by objects produced out of her diasporic cultural aesthetics, exploring ways to represent her native country, Iran, from her vantage point in the U.S. 

Queer zenobinary Kapampangan Pilipinx and Pakistani Muslim performance art duo, mirrored fatality, create their self-proclaimed “cocoon webs”—combining performance art, music, spoken word, film, photography, painting, drawing, and upcycled garments. Combined with anti-imperialist education and healing justice practice spaces, their work acts to mobilize a warrior community responding to transnational calls-to-action for mutual aid, land sovereignty, and prison abolition. 

Yaxkin Fuentes-Barrientos uses painting as a means to explore and connect with Mayan culture, finding familiarity and a sense of belonging in a simpler, ancient world.

Judit Navratil explores what it means to continuously oscillate between analog and digital, past and future, and being present—using digital means to connect to people and places in an attempt to construct “home.”

“In gathering within the framework of MATRIX, we aim to grow towards one another in meaningful ways while honoring the complex lineages that flow through us. We hope to strengthen, expand, and celebrate the webs of care within the SF Bay Area’s creative communities by providing an integral space to practice more aligned ways of being in and engaging with the world and one another, and to indulge in the potency of a dream.”  – Tracy Ren