April 23 – May 28, 2022
Media and Viewing Room: Zeina Barakeh: Wild Cards
Opening reception: Saturday, April 23 from 2 – 5pm; artists’ talks at 3:30pm
San Francisco, CA: Catharine Clark Gallery opens its Spring 2022 program with Masami Teraoka: The Last Swan Lake and Al Farrow: New Sculptures, two ambitious solo exhibitions presented in tandem from April 23 – May 28, 2022. Equally acclaimed for their high craft and their commitment to social commentary, Teraoka and Farrow create works that investigate pressing issues of our time: the devastating impacts of war; human rights violations; and environmental collapse. Their exhibitions, presented in conversation with one another, powerfully ask us to pause and reflect on our collective responsibility to one another, and what’s at stake when we allow violence to go unchecked.
Al Farrow’s now-iconic Reliquaries series – featured in the multi-venue traveling survey exhibition Al Farrow: Divine Ammunition (2015-2019) – casts a striking visual commentary on the contemporary political climate, religion, war, history, culture, and faith. Intricately crafted from munitions and guns, Farrow’s sculptures draw on the tension between religion and violence, peace and brutality, and the sacred and the unholy.
Farrow’s recent sculptures include reliquaries to Santo Guerro, Farrow’s invented “god of war” whose likeness has been reduced to stray relics – the bones of a middle finger or two thumbs – that both evoke a macabre and gothic humor while reminding us of the very real human costs of war.
New Sculptures also features secular reliquaries like LEGACY (2021/2022), in which a rusted blue helmet – a reference to the United Nations – perches over a child’s gas mask, with ammunition strewn around the base. Through this unsettling juxtaposition, Farrow opens his critique to non-faith-based institutions that, while ostensibly meant to protect our human rights, are also culpable of violence through inaction.
