Sight School

Below are images from the closing of the 5 week exhibition.
Artists include: Kelly Lynn Jones, Michelle Blade, Brandon Walls Olsen, Matthew Waldbillig, Georgia Carbone, Maggie Haas, Samantha Roth, Collin McKelvey, and Victoria Keddie.

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For the closing on Saturday the 6th, Kelly Lynn Jones will work with all of the artists involved and create a group exhibition that will ultimately highlight the many actions and objects that occupied the space in October. New pieces will be made from the earlier installations as well as a sound piece from Collin McKelvey who documented the movement …during the making of all the pieces. Victoria Keddie will also be recreating through video and sound a set of objects Jones had sent to her in NYC.

Observation Booth: (The gallery’s window box which became the intermediate between the external outside community and the internal space of the gallery)

The Observation Booth has been a month-long investigation into the physical, historical, and social space surrounding the gallery. Taking up residence in the front window, Georgia Carbone and Kelly Lynn Jones have collected artifacts, stories, and observations from the 5600 block of San Pablo Ave. The final presentation of this project, during the closing on November 6th, will be an interpretive distillation of the material that has accumulated.

Chance plays a huge part in how Jones’s work unfolds, which lead to why she decided to invite other artists to help create a new show each week. This past month 8 artists joined her in re-imagining the same gallery space each week for four weeks. Her role shifted as artist, curator, architect, director and performer simultaneously, creating a variety of perspectives while working on all of the installations.

Each week provided a new space of inquiry, thought and engagement. The collaborations for the weekly installments were first conceived out of considering the commonalities between the artist and Jones. They created a concept around those common interests and how those ideas could function as well as highlight the space. Each weekly project proved to be about process, problem solving, time constraints and ultimately learning to let go once the opening was over since a new installment was beginning. As the reflection of the past month sets in, most of the artists involved saw the weeks as a beginning of a larger collaboration and will continue to build off of the work they began in that week at Sight School.

The ideas that were investigated throughout the month of October within a multitude of media are as follows:

Seeking to define moments of internal focus, homage to the present and the importance of pause and reflection, creating instructions as a way to make art, exploring the many layers of how history unfolds between the archetypal function of an object and story telling, and probing what it means for an artist to work, and what that work is.

Artists include: Kelly Lynn Jones, Michelle Blade, Brandon Walls Olsen, Matthew Waldbillig, Georgia Carbone, Maggie Haas, Samantha Roth, Collin McKelvey, and Victoria Keddie.

After turning Sight School into a workshop, we curated from the pieces we made and created an installation from them. Georgia Carbone continued working in the Observation Booth and took photos of objects, spaces and places she profiled from a cabinet tool she found on the first walk early October.

This week was super awesome. Maggie Haas, Samantha Roth and I turned Sight School into a workshop.

Please join us for the fourth opening of Re-Imagine | Re-Build | Repeat:

Saturday, October 30 · 7:00pm – 9:00pm

For week four, Kelly Jones, Samantha Roth and Maggie Haas will turn Sight School into a workshop.

They will veer off the track of their regular studio practices to spend a week making things without considering ahead of time whether they’re art or not. What happens when you don’t differentiate between making a drawing and making a bookshelf? Or a shirt? They’ll think about why they get the urge to take on these personal projects, from cooking to gardening to carpentry, when they are in the studio.

The artists will come prepared with a wish list of projects that get sidelined in the studio. They will start by constructing their ideal temporary workshop. Some of their projects may overlap, and they will share tools and materials, and maybe collaborate.

The week will be about realizing dream projects and probing what it means for an artist to work, and what that work is.

Observation Booth: Georgia Carbone and Kelly Lynn Jones:

This week at Sight School, Kelly Lynn Jones and Georgia Carbone will continue investigating the neighborhood with collecting, archiving, exploring, talking with neighbors and finishing up the 4 week residency of the Observation Booth.

Stay tuned for THE CLOSING ON NOVEMBER 6th!! This will be a culmination of all the projects that took place at Sight School for the past 5 weeks.

Kelly Lynn Jones and Matthew Waldbillig explore the many layers of how history unfolds between the archetypal function of an object and story telling. By using objects found buried in the back yard at Sight School and the folklore passed on by local residents they create their own myths within the place. To start their own layer they collect the… ephemera of the past and aim to highlight the constant evolving nature of history.

Gallery

1. This is what remains from a guitar that belonged to an unknown aspiring folk singer of the late 1960’s. He realized his songs were completely derivative and unable to create an original song so he jumped off the Bay Bridge to his death.

2. Before the buffalo moved to Golden Gate Park, they roamed with the wild dogs of Oakland.

3. No clue.

4. Found in back yard.

5. This was used in a ritual a bunch of people from the 1970’s performed. They all had taken a bunch of acid and were making up the ritual based on watching the Wicker Man. Little did they know they were actually calling up evil spirits. No one knows exactly what happened that night, all that was left was a giant black burnt circle in the ground and this star shape. There was only one survivor who currently is in a mental hospital. The other participants’ whereabouts are unknown.

6. The gun was used by a woman who killed her husband after she discovered sexually suggestive letters he received from another woman. After confronting him, he denied it and claimed they were not his. She did not believe him, so in a fit of rage, she used his shotgun and shot his leg almost completely off. He begged for his life and swore they were not his, so she looked closer and noticed they were addressed to his father who had the same name and were written twenty years later. Embarrassed and frightened, she ran out of the house screaming and was never to be seen again.

7. This Pick Axe was from the late 1800’s and was discarded after never striking gold.

8. This was one of two hinges that used to hold up a wooden shelf up high in an attic of an office building that used to be on San Pablo Ave. On this shelf there were folders of important document on the Key System, which was the mass transit in the East Bay started in 1903 and ended 1960. The documents disappeared right before the Key System was stopped. We will never know what was in the documents and if they were part of the reason the transit was shut down.

Studio

9. Current Resident

10. Not everyone that goes to Burning Man is a bad person, I know one.

11. He wanted to have a bike shop, so this space was perfect. He began to collect used bikes. One day he couldn’t leave his house.

12. I think he came from back East, New York maybe. His voice quivered while his hand movements were fast. He bought every major city Newspaper daily and covered the windows so no one could see in. He disappeared one day. Months later a dry cleaners moved in.

13. During Prohibition the fermentation process was often extended by burying the bottles underground. This was also a way to throw off the cops.

14. No one believed the hippy woman’s ghost stories, however the creaking on the roof never ceases.

15. Documentation of one week in Sight School’s history.
Notes, Objects, Dialogue, Various Remnants

October 23, 2010, Sight School, Oakland. CA

For Week 3, Kelly Lynn Jones and Matthew Waldbillig explore the many layers of how history unfolds between the archetypal function of an object and story telling. By using objects found buried in the back yard at Sight School and the folklore passed on by local residents they create their own myths within the place. To start their own layer they collect the… ephemera of the past and aim to highlight the constant evolving nature of history.

In the form of an interactive installation, Kelly Lynn Jones and Matthew Waldbillig present their story at Sight School.

Observation Booth: Georgia Carbone and Kelly Lynn Jones:

This week at Sight School, Kelly Lynn Jones and Georgia Carbone begin to look closer at the various photographs and stories within the neighborhood that were discovered last week from the local Library. This week parallels the project inside Sight School with Matthew Waldbillig.