First West Coast Exhibition Slow Research Lab Featuring Maria Blaisse

Fri, Apr 22 - Fri, Jun 10  2016

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

From April 22 until June 10, Slow Research Lab presents “Slow Dialogues: Time, Space, and Scale” featuring Dutch interdisciplinary artist Maria Blaisse at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA. The exhibition invites holistic, reflective and critical understandings of both our immediate surroundings and our greater environment. Exploring the themes time, space, and scale, three international artists bring their diverse creative perspectives and approaches into site-specific dialogue with social, cultural, and environmental conditions of the Bay Area.

In “Traveling Geometry” (2008-2016), designer Maria Blaisse exhibits a dynamic array of sculptural bamboo forms, demonstrating her vision for the near-future: a humanity-built environment that is flexible and closer to nature. Two woven structures are displayed alongside film and photographs in which dancers engage them in graceful interplay. Another collection of simple bamboo lines suspended from the Grand Lobby ceiling activate the upper registers of the building, and will occasionally be lowered down to the lobby floor and engaged by live performers during the exhibition; a work exploring different scales.

Furthermore, artist and architectural preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos continues his ongoing series “The Ethics of Dust,” exploring what he considers to be humanity’s most prolific, and neglected, cultural product: pollution. Additionally, Megumi Matsubara’s “It is a Garden” (2016) engages with YBCA’s building through a site-specific installation of prints, photographs, glass, film, and mirrors. Inspired by the site’s close proximity to the Yerba Buena Gardens, Matsubara asks through her work “What are the invisible elements that define a garden’s presence? 

Related Programming

April 22, 6 PM – Opening Reception and Maria Blaisse Performance

Enjoy Maria Blaisse’s performance, “Moving Meshes,” where dancers engage with flexible, woven structures that symbolize the flexibility of nature. After the perfomance, there will be an opening reception to welcome the new installations, from 7 until 8 PM.

May 8, 12:15 PM: “Dance of Possibilites” Performance

As a part of the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, “Slow Dialogues” presents a “Dance of Possibilities” with Dutch interdisciplinary artist Maria Blaisse and dancers from Moving Meshes. Local choreographers, dancers, and architects will lead a procession from YBCA through Yerba Buena Gardens. A performance will follow in the Gardens, showcasing Blaisse’s vision of a human-built environment that is flexible and closer to nature, as dancers engage with bamboo woven structures. The procession will lead back to YBCA, and end with a conversation facilitated by Slow Dialogues curator Carolyn F. Strauss, and David Wilson. 

About Maria Blaisse 

Maria Blaisse graduated at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam in 1968. Two years later she was a participant in the design studio of Jack Lenor Larsen New York.Her projects can be understood as sculptures or costumes. In many cases, it is difficult to determine which is in control: the body or the form. Perhaps more clearly than any other artist, Blaisse resides firmly between the disciplines of art, design, textiles, and fashion. Among other venues, her work has been exhibited in Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Craftsmuseum in London, Grand Palais in Paris, and Kulturhuset in Stockholm. 

About Slow Research Lab

Slow Research Lab is a multidisciplinary research and curatorial platform based in the Netherlands. Through a mix of theoretical reflection and creative experimentation, “the lab” investigates an expanded terrain of individual and collective potential that brings balance to the pace at which we encounter the world, and integrity to how we position ourselves within it. In that sense, the word ‘Slow’ is intended not only to inspire a different velocity of engagement, but also to evoke a quality of being, characterized by critical thinking. The thinkers and practitioners who contribute to the lab’s research are designers, architects, artists, ecologists, technologists and activists whose experimental, often speculative forms of practice challenge the conceptual, methodological and experiential boundaries of their varied disciplines. 

About Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts was founded in 1993 out of an expressed need for an accessible, high-profile San Francisco venue devoted to contemporary visual art, performance, and film/video representing diverse cultural and artistic perspectives. Distinguished by its support for contemporary artists from around the world, YBCA is also recognized for the important role the organization plays in the San Francisco Bay Area arts ecology and in the community at large.