In an election year, it’s inevitable that Americans will tend toward solipsism with even greater ease. This is an interesting moment to investigate contemporary American identity while we are internationally reviled, in the midst of a seemingly endless war halfway around the globe, and divided into various camps of us and them (blue and red, recent immigrants and descendants of immigrants, etc.) Given our cultural disparities, including the vast gulf between most Americans and the art world, an exhibition attempting to come to terms with who we are as Americans can itself be problematic. Reconciling America: Miraculous Encounters with the Mundane, currently on view at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, is a compelling presentation of portraits of Americans, from artists’ family members to total strangers glimpsed on the web, and addresses the relationship of contemporary artistic practice to various strands in American cultural identity. Many of the artists in the exhibition attempt to valorize the everyday details and stories of contemporary American life but at times struggle with a patronizing ironic distance in relation to their subjects.

Some of the artists in the show use personal stories to examine the significance of the mundane in our day-to-day existence. Jennifer Durban’s audio work, I Met my Dad on Friendster, is set into the doorway of an unused elevator in a dark side alcove off of one of the galleries, giving one the odd impression of either worshipping in a small chapel or having trespassed into a creepy private backspace. The autobiographical narrative is reminiscent of an episode of This American Life, the National Public Radio show built around the narrative value of the fine details of everyday life. Durban intersperses her story of meeting her birth father through Friendster with recordings of testimonials by friends and family. It’s a tribute to the engaging nature of the work that I was left wanting more information from the story. The piece closes with her musing on the new possibilities of social networking sites not only to create deeper connections between people but also to produce new conflicts in managing the public nature of our private lives.

Ellen Lake and Zefrey Throwell are each tireless documenters of others’ personal stories. Lake’s experimental video shorts portray collectors of all sorts of mundane objects, from macaroni and cheese boxes to plastic straws. These portraits of accumulation poetically describe our efforts to define ourselves through our belongings. Zefrey Throwell’s radio show Frank Prattle is an energetic and prolific series of conversations between creatively paired artworld personalities. Throwell’s interviews are being conducted in the SFAC gallery regularly throughout the run of the show, and are archived at www.frankprattle.com.

Lynn Marie Kirby
34/400 (Standardized) Screen Tests, 2008
Two of 34/400 Screen Tests
Digital Video Still

In the rear of the gallery, behind a dark curtain is an elegant and somber video installation by Lynn Marie Kirby. 34/400 (Standardized) Screen Tests features video portraits of two adolescent boys, James and Paul, presumably Kirby’s son and a peer, who, given the title, seem to be auditioning for manhood. The hypnotic black and white video of the boys gazing, bored, into the camera is set off-center into a graphic white square outline on a black background, as if one is viewing them through a viewfinder or crosshairs. Close-ups of James and Paul fidgeting awkwardly are alternated with longer shots of them answering pointed questions posed off-screen such as “When do boys become men?” and “What is a hero?” The projection is accompanied by two framed essays, each titled “War,” and carefully hand-written by one of the boys. The texts, meditating on the nature of war in their childish scrawl, at times seem to parrot an adult’s perspective while also comparing battle to their personal experiences of arguments and video games. The piece reflects our deep anxiety about the fate of our children and calls attention to the ways in which mythic and heroic narratives circumscribing the gender identity of children are reinforced.

JD Beltran is also collaborating in a sense with her young son, Sebastien Bachar. Her vertical portraits of him from the Adventures series, which seem to portray a small figure within an almost oppressively vast sky of possibility above, are installed next to a few snapshots taken by Sebastien himself, suggesting the flipside of the quip "my kid could do that," namely, 'that kid's work has the studied amateur look that many contemporary photographers aspire to.'

Julia Page’s First Kills series of reproductions of newspaper photographs of children celebrating their first successful deer hunt looks at another way in which images of children are used. The circulation of these newpaper photographs reinforces this ritual as an important rite of passage. The original newspaper dot patterns throughout Page’s prints point to the images’ origins, but their recontextualization into the gallery environment carries an air of condescension.

Brendan Lott’s work originates as photographs uploaded by unknown individuals to a publicly accessible website. Lott then hires master painters in Dafen, China to reproduce the images, often snapshots of adolescent girls in provocative poses, in oil on canvas. (One exception to this is the piece “I Just Want to Run Out of Here Screaming,” the intriguing image used on the show’s postcard of a teenage boy with his hands in front of his face.) However, the fact that none of this background information is actually provided within the context of the exhibition and is only briefly mentioned in Lott’s artist’s statement, casts the sense of an elitist in-joke over the work. In commissioning the hand-made replication of digital images, Lott attempts to recast them as one-of-a-kind objects with a greater caché within the global capitalist market. However, one degree of separation from their infinitely reproducible context doesn’t remove them from a smugly exploitative Girls Gone Wild genre. Lott directly refers in his artist’s statement to this work as “the contemporary exotic,” placing it squarely within the very long problematic history of a white upper-middle class male portrayal of the other as an exotic object.

Both Lott and Paul Mullins refer to their work as “elevating” their poor, uneducated, working class white subjects. The patronizing quaintness of this formulation frames these subjects within a high vs. low culture divide. Despite any claim to elevation, the sense that it is only through the privileged position of the artists that the true value of these subjects can be revealed merely reinscribes them as the naïve purveyors of raw artistic material. Mullins’ hand-drawn pencil and acrylic pieces seem to be trying to inhabit both a position of irony and a slightly more sympathetic place. His human subjects are often peripheral to the frame while animals and machinery take center stage. The goofy nature of some of these pastoral scenes – a dog humping a football helmet for instance – imbues the work with a certain whimsical tenderness.

Tucker Nichols
We Do Smog, 2008
155 Grove Street store front

Tucker Nichols’ hand-written phrases on scraps of paper and cardboard retain the air of random analog-style eaves-dropping, appropriated from anonymous sources who are outside of the global image market. Collectively, the gleaned shards from the detritus of our everyday background noise, form a portrait of Americans preoccupied with lists and convenience which suggest an undercurrent of anxiety or anticipation, yet the message “lost bees” casts a note of despondency and the window painting at 155 Grove Street, “We do smog,” seems to shout in desperation.

Dina Danish
All My Life I Have Tried to Fit Cheese on Toast, 2007
Objects from Walgreens on Filmore and Haight that are the same size as toast
Digital Video Still

All My Life I Had to Fit Cheese on Toast, is a repetitive video by Dina Danish in which hands place objects purchased at Walgreens upon a slice of bread on which they fit perfectly. The slap-stick sped-up video robotically catalogs the seemingly endless parade of uniformity and consumability of all the objects in our everyday lives.

Richard Haley is an anomalous romantic within the show. His Bas Jan Ader-influenced piece is a more allegorical way of exploring identity, following a tragic hero in his quest for the sublime. His installation, Pre-Enactment of Being Lost at Sea, includes a handmade wood boat which features two holes in the bottom, fitted with threaded tubes and caps, and a video of two attempts to sink his boat at the same rate as the setting sun in what appears to be a small pond in the midst of suburban traffic and power lines. As in Ader’s projects, Haley’s simultaneous unlikely and nonsensical acts of rehearsing the process of getting lost and of chasing the sun are offset by the very real labor involved in fabricating the boat and rowing and the sense of panic in the handheld camera movement as the water rises.

The title of the exhibition also brings to mind the title of Ader’s project, In Search of the Miraculous, which ended with his ill-fated sea voyage. If the contemporary romantic quest ends with the discovery of the sublime within the everyday details of American lives, a balance must be sought between endless navel-gazing and projecting sublimity onto an ‘other.’ Without this, maybe Americans are just lost at sea in a small pond.

Reconciling America: Miraculous Encounters with the Mundane, Curated by Meg Shiffler, Joyce Grimm, Dana Hemenway, and Zefrey Throwell, will be on view at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery through March 11, 2008.