A Place as remembered: Mark baugh-sasaki
October 1-30, 2021
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 7th, from 4 - 7pm
1632 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94012
Gallery Hours: Thurs -Sun 11am - 6pm and by appointment
re.riddle presents, A Place As Remembered, a solo exhibition of new work by Mark Baugh-Sasaki at 1632 Market Street in Hayes Valley, San Francisco that will run from October 1-30, 2021. This exhibition is the part of re.flect, a program series that spotlights one of the gallery's artists each month. The rotating monthly series offers in-depth access into the respective processes and practices of our global community of artists. In addition, the artists have partnered with re.riddle to release unique works at special prices. These exclusive pieces will only be available during the month of the related exhibition.
Curatorial Statement
Mark Baugh-Sasaki’s multi-media art practice considers the relationship between humans and the natural world by challenging our preconceived notions of our place within the landscape. Rather than seeing ourselves as distinct from our surroundings, Baugh-Sasaki posits we are part of them, simultaneously separate and the same. Investigating the continually shifting cycle of interaction between man and earth that perpetuates as we evolve, Baugh-Sasaki reflects on how we tether ourselves to a place differently each time we visit it. A Place as Remembered, an exhibition of new work by Mark Baugh-Sasaki examines landscapes, experiences and memories through the concept of polysemy. This idea refers to the coexistence of many possible meanings for a single word or phrase. Applied within the framework of landscape, Baugh-Sasaki explores in his work the possibility for concurrent experiences and multiplicity of meanings attached to a single place. Landscapes are a repository of human existence as we each imbue a place with our individual experiences, paradigms and memories. This additive reality exists within ourselves, as past memories of a specific place co-exist with our contemporary experiences of it. But what is the nature of this engagement when the landscape itself fundamentally changes?
At a time when our natural environments are being altered by human behavior at an alarming rate, Baugh-Sasaki seeks to reconnect with places that have acted as anchors for him in the past. Yet these special places of regeneration, restoration and family connection have been dramatically altered through a changing landscape. Coming to terms with the conclusion that they are no longer what they used to be, Baugh-Sasaki accedes to this new reality. He articulates, “These altered places have dramatically shifted my connection to them. They become places that condense time. The memory of it, the current state of it, and its future.”
Baugh-Sasaki describes his personal and physical tracking of the San Francisco Bay Area landscape from months-long to decades-long periods of time as, “experiencing the past, present and future all at the same time within the landscape.” Represented in his Marking Time photographic series (2021), Baugh-Sasaki visualizes this stacking time on top of itself and the cyclical nature of our visiting and revisiting, affecting and being affected by the earth. In response to the devastating California wildfires that have altered the Bay Area landscape so dramatically in a short period of time, his Earth/Sky photographic series (2021) examines this poignant combination of memory, sensation, experience of the land pre-fire co-existing with new experiences with the land post-fire. The stunning gradient shifts from earth to sky can be interpreted as a metaphor of the larger shift from earth as we have known it, to the earth as it now is. In A Place As Remembered, Baugh-Sasaki makes visual the polysemy of our environments and pushes us to consider our own rootedness and connection to place in this emerging, constantly changing natural world.
Visit A Place As Remembered: Mark Baugh-Sasaki at 1632 Market Street in San Francisco from October 1-30, 2021.
Programming
A Place As Remembered is part of re.flect, a program series that spotlights one of the gallery's artists each month. Each show offers in-depth access to the respective processes and practices within the global artistic community. A program will be presented alongside the exhibition that relates to Mark Baugh-Sasaki's artistic practice. Please join us!
In Conversation: Marci Kwon x Mark Baugh-Sasaki
Thursday, October 14 at 6pm PST/ 8pm CST/ 9pm EST
Marci Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University and co-director of the Cantor Art Center's Asian American Art Initiative. At Stanford, she is a faculty affiliate of Modern Thought and Literature, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Asian American Studies, and Feminist and Gender Studies. She is the author of Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism (Princeton, 2021), and her work has appeared in Third Text, Modernism/Modernity Print +, and edited volumes on social art history, self-taught art, and the early history of the Museum of Modern Art. She is the recipient of Stanford’s Asian American Teaching Prize, CCSRE Teaching Prize, Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and the Women's Faculty Forum Inspiring Early Career Academic Award.
Mark Baugh-Sasaki is an interdisciplinary artist whose art practice focuses on our connection to place through embedded narratives in both the built and the natural landscape. He received his BFA in 2004 from Carnegie Mellon University and his MFA in 2017 from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally; most recently at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2020-21. He has been a resident at Headlands Center for the Arts and an Honorary James Irvine Fellow at Djerassi Resident Artist Program. He is a recipient of The Hopper Prize and the Cadogan Award, and his work is included in the public collections at Recology Artist in Residence Program and the University of San Francisco.
If you missed the program, click below to watch the recording:
click on images for more detail
