The group exhibition All Good Things… and accompanying performances investigate the legacy and contemporary form of West Coast time-based conceptual art as well as the unique relationships forged between objecthood, experience and temporal structures. During the course of the exhibition featured artworks fundamentally change, evolve, degrade, are consumed or are fully realized. Featured works include photography, video, sculpture, time-based art and installations.

All Good Things… opens Friday, November 22, 6–9pm with a free to attend reception featuring an audience-participatory performance by Midori in which the audience is invited to fling and shatter ceramic dishware and crockery. Kristin Cammermeyer, a 2013 artist-in-residence at the Recology Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center, will expose her artistic process live to the public for the first time by establishing a working studio space within SOMArts’ main gallery. There, she will build, deconstruct and alter an large-scale installation intermittently throughout the run of the exhibition. The public may donate objects for incorporation into the work, which focuses on process as a method of resisting the terminality of other more traditional art forms.

Opening event attendees will also have the first opportunity in the United States to imbibe an artwork made by Philip Ross, who creates durable, functional and biodegradable sculptures from Chinese medicinal mushrooms that can be ground and brewed as tea. Monks from Sera Je Secondary School in Karnataka, India will build a Tibetan sand mandala in the gelugpa tradition.

SOMArts offers a table with three chess boards featuring pieces made of clear and colored ice for public interaction, referencing the Fluxus tradition of chess as sculpture. There will be a 15-minute live music set by Cookie Tongue and an “Unscheduled Appearance” by Tom Marioni. In the theater will be a free screening of “Decasia” by Bill Morrison on the hour every hour.

Melting artworks on view during regular gallery hours include a caramelized sugar installation by Gay Outlaw, and a sculpture by Kos that must be refreshed with a new block of ice daily. Ice water pours through negative space between a fifteen-foot-tall wooden vee creating a deconstructed icicle as the block slowly descends.

Chris Fraser transforms the entire gallery into a site-specific, time-specific camera obscura by cutting a series of small holes in the walls to choreograph the light of the setting sun across the room. Light fades and deteriorates silver gelatin prints of photographs of  landscapes and domestic situations by John Steck Jr. These images are unfixed and will inevitably fade into nothingness. A large-scale lenticular image by Heather Sparks, mutable depending upon the viewer’s location, samples colors present in the artist’s skin and requires movement of the viewer in time to see the variable image.

Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde exhibits wall-scale documentation of a cloud he created in April 2013 in conjunction with the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery’s exhibition Conversation 6: Jason Hanasik and Berndnaut Smilde, curated by Meg Shiffler. Smilde spent three days in the Green Room of San Francisco’s War Memorial Veterans Building, creating clouds and orchestrating a photo shoot with renowned photographer RJ Muna.

The gallery annex features Mauricio Ancalmo’s “War Footage (Fifth Articulation),” a piece which utilizes an altered 16mm film projector missing a take-up reel, which spools onto the floor a length of red film leader. The unspooled leader must eventually be manually rewound, gesturing toward the burden of postwar reconstruction.

The Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts, in collaboration with Director Shalini Agrawal and Scholar in Residence Chris Treggiari, presents a newly designed gallery-based interchange that offers a framework to develop a socially engaged process. This interchange, open to all participants, suggests methods to help connect with community partners, develop related art and design projects and collaborate with diverse participants.

A series of performances and artist talks accompany the exhibition, which culminates in the fourth iteration of the time-based spectacle 100 Performances for the Hole, a mini-marathon of artistic moments beginning on Saturday, January 4, 2014 at 5:58pm and ending near midnight. Admission is $12.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS INCLUDE
Shalini Agrawal
Mauricio Ancalmo
Jeremiah Barber
Kristin Cammermeyer
Chris Fraser
Dustin Fosnot
Tom Comitta in collaboration with Invisible Venue
Kate Gilmore
Tom Comitta in collaboration with Invisible Venue
Allan Kaprow (facilitated by Jeff Kelley)
Paul Kos
Anya Liftig
Midori
Gay Outlaw
Mitzi Pederson
Phil Ross
Doni Silver Simons
Berndnaut Smilde
Heather Sparks
John Steck Jr.
Chris Treggiari
Michael Zheng
California College for the Arts’ Center for Art and Public Life