Night Light: Multimedia Garden Party 2015
SOMArts Cultural Center presents Night Light: Multimedia Garden Party, a one-night art exhibition that centres on luminous art installations, projections and performances.
Featuring the works of more than 30 artists, each piece in the exhibit utilises light within art in distinctive ways. Now in its 5th year, Night Light has aligned itself with SOMArts’ current exhibition Making a Scene: 50 Years of Alternative Bay Area Spaces.
Founded in 1979, SOMArts strives to make the arts inclusive and accessible to all through providing a space and production support for non-profit events and collaborating with artists and organisations that emphasise community. The cultural center also uses arts to generate cultural respect and civic participation. Making use of SOMArts’ post-industrial indoor area, garden path, theater, and multiple gallery spaces, Night Light will be able to maximise the diversity of the site-specific installations with this multitude of locations. Using the variety of spaces, provided by the SOMArts, will help unify communities in their joint effort of aspiring for social justice through art. Making a Scene celebrates the history of independent and alternative spaces in the Bay Area that have been at the forefront of social justice issues.
Curated by Melorra Green and Kelsey McCurdy, Night Light not only functions as a homage to activist artists in the Bay Area, but also as a platform for these artists to voice and raise awareness for these particular social justice issues.
Key projections include Karen Seneferu’s Black Lives Matter: From Fruitvale to Ferguson, which highlights the discrimination and violence people of color have faced at the hands of those abusing law enforcement. In Seneferu’s own words, “The video challenges the idea of gazing out and into the eyes of others who refuse to recognize the genocide occurring in these communities by the judicial system”.
Filmmaker Tooth and movement artist and writer Sophia Wang, on the other hand, use parts of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s experiments with text, performance, and film in their joint performance/installation that makes use of “cinema povera” where a new image is formed by printing over industrial film that has been discarded of its original images. These key works emphasise the multifariousness of art in the exhibition and the respective communities or individuals they draw inspiration from.
Making a Scene: 50 Years of Alternative Bay Area Spaces will be on display in SOMArts’ Main Gallery from Thursday 9 July – Thursday 20 August 2015. Night Light: Multimedia Garden Party will take place on Saturday 18 July 2015. The exhibit will open its galleries at 8.30pm (PDT) followed by performances from 9.00pm (PDT) to Midnight.
Words by Perwana Nazif.
—
