Helen Mirra & Sean Thackrey @ BAMPFA, Berkeley - No Horizon

No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
July 3 - August 25, 2019

An exhibition at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) showcases new series by two Bay Area artists whose work is influenced by Zen Buddhism. No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey marks the first dual exhibition of work by Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey, two artists based in Marin County whose respective practices emphasize simplicity, texture, and a deep awareness of place. The exhibition features more than a dozen recent works by each artist, most of which are receiving their first museum presentation.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by Without Horizon, a series of works created by Sean Thackrey in collaboration with the artist and composer John Cage. A winemaker and art dealer who cofounded the San Francisco gallery Thackrey & Robertson in 1970, Sean Thackrey has sustained a decades-long photography practice, producing works he describes as “objects, marks on paper, produced by photography. . . meant to be objects of contemplation.” The BAMPFA exhibition presents work from Sean Thackrey’s latest extended series, created between 2012 and the present: photographs of weathered slabs of Venetian stone, capturing the subtle yet expressive transformations of Venice’s distinctive limestone surfaces as they slowly decay over time. Each of  Sean Thackrey’s photographs are mounted on dyed panels of wood, meticulously crafted by the artist to resonate with the distinctive texture of each image.

Sean Thackrey’s photographs invite viewers to engage with the uncanny beauty of seemingly ordinary surfaces, evoking through their simplicity a mood of contemplative repose that reflects the artist’s interest in Zen Buddhism. A fellow Zen practitioner, Helen Mirra arrives at a similar effect through her own distinctive series of works, a set of intimately scaled woven objects that capture her somatic experiences and the outdoor geography of the North Bay landscape. Named for the month in which they were made, these works are generally between two and three feet in size, and are characterized by subtle variations in color and texture that seem to shift when viewed from different angles. The nuances of the material—mostly linen, with some wool, cotton, and silk—combine with a restrained palate to convey intuitive sensations of place, atmosphere, and season. The exhibition at BAMPFA includes excerpts from this series of works created between 2017 and the present.

Emerging from different generations and working in different media, Sean Thackrey and Helen Mirra have both created bodies of work that similarly capture the ephemeral beauty of being and time. The minute variations of color and texture in their works reward close viewings and relaxed concentration, recalling the Zen instruction to “do nothing” as a stance of open engagement with the world. Notably both artists have chosen to focus their attention, and that of their viewers, on seemingly everyday materials, highlighting aesthetic and even spiritual dimensions in the simplicity of fabric and stone.

“We’re honored to bring together at BAMPFA two great Bay Area artists whose work embraces the simple act of seeing as an inspiration to deep reflection and understanding,” said BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder, who organized the exhibition. “In both Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey’s remarkable bodies of work, we are moved by the simultaneous expression of the particular and universal.”

In conjunction with No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey, BAMPFA presents a reading by Bay Area poets Lyn Hejinian and Frances Richard, who respond to Mirra and Thackrey’s work with original compositions that grapple in language with wordlessness. The reading takes place on Friday, August 23 at 12 p.m. and is free with museum admission.

No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey is organized by BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder with Curatorial Assistant Lucia Momoh. The exhibition is made possible with lead support from Carla and David Crane.

BAMPFA
2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA
bampfa.org

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha @ BAMPFA, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California
January 31 – April 22, 2018

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 

A Ble Wail, 1975

Performance, Worth Ryder Gallery, University of California, Berkeley 

BAMPFA; gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation 

Photo: Trip Callaghan

The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents an innovatively organized exhibition of work by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), the first solo presentation in more than a decade of work by the accomplished artist, filmmaker, and writer. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee features nearly fifty of Cha’s works in a range of media, organized for the first time into distinct thematic groupings inspired by the ten chapters of her iconic 1982 book Dictee.

Drawing from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s rarely exhibited archives—which were donated to BAMPFA in 1992—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee captures the interdisciplinary scope of Cha’s artistic output, which encompassed photography, poetry, film, video, live performance, mail art, sculpture, works on paper, and more. The selected works highlight the artist’s interest in the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of language, which is also a central focus of Dictee—a formally ambitious work that includes passages in English, French, and Korean. The exhibition is organized into ten sections that correspond to the chapters of Dictee, with excerpts from the book displayed alongside individual works to illuminate connections and themes that extend throughout the artist’s practice.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Re Dis Appearing, 1977

Video; black and white, sound, 3 min.

BAMPFA; gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 

Repetitive Pattern, 1975

Ink on cloth, sewn with thread; 46 x 46 in.

BAMPFA; gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation 

Photo: Benjamin Blackwell 

Born in South Korea, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha immigrated with her family to the United States as a child and settled in the Bay Area, where she studied French at San Francisco’s Convent of the Sacred Heart before enrolling at UC Berkeley. Much of the work in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee was created during Cha’s time as a student in Berkeley, where she earned four degrees and worked as an employee of BAMPFA. The exhibition includes rarely seen correspondence and other ephemera from Cha’s life, which ended in 1982 with her untimely death at the age of 31.

“By exploring Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s art through the lens of Dictee, and vice versa, the exhibition offers viewers an opportunity to appreciate the global resonance of the artist's oeuvre and the ways in which it was profoundly interconnected across works and media, returning again and again to certain key themes,” said Assistant Curator Stephanie Cannizzo, who curated the exhibition.

”We are excited to introduce Cha’s work to a new generation while at the same time offering a fresh take on this tremendously important and original artist,” said BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder, who has previously curated multiple exhibitions of Cha’s work. “This exploration of Cha’s oeuvre through the lens of Dictee could really only happen at BAMPFA, where we are privileged to hold such an extraordinarily deep archive of the artist’s work and ephemera.”

In conjunction with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee, BAMPFA is mounting a panel discussion and other public programs to reexamine the artist’s legacy; a full schedule of these events will be announced at bampfa.org. Copies of Dictee are on hand in the exhibition gallery and are available to purchase at the BAMPFA store.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee is organized by Assistant Curator Stephanie Cannizzo and made possible with support from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Archive Fund and Young Chul and Elizabeth Cha Park.

BAMPFA
www.bampfa.org