SARAH MCMENIMEN: GARWOOD
Sep 30 - Dec 30, 2007
Queen's Nails Annex Extensions proudly presents Sarah McMenimen's exhibition,
Garwood. The show is on view at Muddy Waters Coffee House. 199 Tiffany Avenue
(between 29th St & Duncan St) San Francisco, CA 94110
Garwood is a photo-based project that examines memory, alienation, and interpersonal relations. McMenimen utilizes her mothers’ hometown and house in order to investigate cultural shifts in communities based on birthright and tradition, such as towns where etiquette and tradition stand before self-needs. The artist for the first time last year, visited her mother's hometown and noticed that none of the homes here had been redecorated since the 1960s, almost as though cultural conditions here frozen, stopped within time and space. McMenimen compulsively took photographs of these rooms and homes while visiting and felt a strong desire to reconstruct these homes, in an attempt to take possession of these spaces and to also find a place for herself in them. Her first step was to print photographs she had taken onto needlepoint fabric and embroider over the images. She framed the objects in small shadow boxes she constructed, giving the new rooms a safe and private place to live in, thus creating a new space between past and present.
Sarah McMenimen is a senior completing her bachelor's in Photography at California College of the Arts. She is a student of Jim Goldberg and Larry Sultan, and works with the Paper Airplane Collective in San Francisco. She has shown at Test Strip Gallery in Oakland, Clean Room Gallery in Oakland, ABCo Gallery in Oakland, Isabel Percy West Gallery in Oakland, and at Red Ink Studios in San Francisco, where she also holds a monthly Movie Night which showcases local Media Artists and films from her personal video vault.
Queen’s Nails Annex located in the Mission District of San Francisco, has built a strong reputation for dedicating its project space to presenting collaborative, site-specific and experimental works by artists. At this point in the gallery’s tenure, Queen’s Nails Annex will launch an individualized movement that will allow the gallery’s inception from one central space to expand outward into the complex sub-communities of San Francisco. This movement titled "Queen’s Nails Annex Extensions" will allow artists to use varying neighborhood locations to serve as modules for housing exhibitions akin to Queen’s Nails Annex’s original gallery location, following the traditional gallery mission objectives. Artists will have the opportunity to work outside of their normal practices and have new unexpected challenges working with unique spaces that have already formed their own identities and reputations in different ways from a traditional gallery viewing setting. Some of these locations being: coffee shops, laundromats, video stores, bookstores, etc. Queen’s Nails Annex is presenting this project as a way for its artists to think about the work they create in connection to the community in which it is being presented. Most importantly, the artists are able to reflect on viewers and their association with their artworks and their relationship to everyday life within these sub-communities.
