Wed. May 20: BARGE & Mission17 event with Erick Lyle, Kari Orvik, & Nick Pagoulatos

Please join Mission17 Gallery & BARGE as we host another event in conjunction with the current “17 Reasons Why” exhibit, an ongoing residency exploring the cultural politics of the Mission district, hosted by David Buuck & BARGE. Writers, artists, & activists Erick Lyle, Kari Orvik, and Nick Pagoulatos will present recent work related to the Mission District and anti-gentrification struggles in San Francisco. There will be food, drinks, and conversation as well, so please come by!

Erick Lyle is a writer, musician, activist, and zine editor. He is the author of *On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City* (Soft Skull), and since 1991 has edited the influential zine *Scam.* He has published work in a wide variety of cultural and political publications, performed in numerous bands, and worked with the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco. He spent much of the 90’s hopping freight trains around the country and living without electricity in abandoned buildings. For most of 15 years, now, though, he has resided mostly in San Francisco.

Kari Orvik is a San Francisco photographer whose work in low-income housing led her to start creating public portraiture projects. Like a portable JC Penney, she has set up on-site photo studios in SRO’s, on rooftops and on the street, where community members can get formal portraits for their own use. Displaying these portraits in public spaces has been a way to recognize as members of the community everyone who lives, works, hangs out in or passes through our public spaces. In 2007 she received a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant for her photo and video project Mission Portrait Studio.

Nick Pagoulatos is the Community Planning & Development Director at Dolores Street Community Services, and the Coordinator for MAC, the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, whose goal is to stop the displacement of working class people in the Mission District and San Francisco. He has also worked as the Project Director for St. Peter’s Housing Committee and at the Mission Economic Development Agency on community planning, economic development, and land use issues. With a background in housing law and tenant advocacy, he holds a J.D. from the New College of California.

Wed. May 20, 6-8pm

Mission17 Gallery

2111 Mission Street @ 17th, 4th floor

Reason 8

Because certain privileged vantage points of seeing can be in uneasy relation with modes of surveillance and paranoiac methods of interpretation…

How do the desires of visual and cultural criticism to ‘capture’ its content and render it into some legible form coexist with the limits of one’s training and perspectives? How are forms of visual criticism complicit with the forces of spectatorship or academic discourse? 

Taking a Reading: tripod, cameras, audio

(& late at the office, as I was working on the question of framing spectatorship & talking with Kari Orvik about the proliferation of surveillance cameras in the Mission, I looked out the window & realized that with the sun down & the lights up, it was I who was being watched, on display in the gallery for those across the street, an unwitting work of social sculpture…)

Reason 9

Because how we see the landscape and environment around us is framed by the conditions through which such seeing can take place…

How do our habituated ways of seeing limit what we are drawn to in a landscape or vista, and what gets erased, ignored, pushed out of the frame? What kinds of counter-framings can help provoke new forms of seeing and attention?

Reason 3

Reason 3 : On the Case

Because everyday movement through a neighborhood contributes to our critical understanding of place—the routes and roots, the enticements and hauntings—and how we navigate such spaces helps shape our mental maps of the urban landscape…

How does moving through a site, encountering the street-level visual culture through the prisms of its materiality and its diverse inhabitants, re-frame our notions of place? What vernacular modes of understanding produce what kinds of maps? How does psycho-geographic practice provide the basis for a critical rendering of place? What visual and cultural clues do we follow, and towards what ends?

On the Case 3: performance video, w/improvised text, April 09. 

On the Case 1: (after Lisa Mee) performance video, w/improvised text, April 09

more here

More Reasons

another visitor’s (unsigned) contribution:

“saint mornings earth the street side of piss and aluminum spies some random junkies jagged crest crusts stowing prostitutes over the pockets rages meanwhile urine soaks ambitions cracks into hopes and shit and vomit into flip flopped feet (rage) lost murals gaudy sunlight mirror garbage and wind automobiles dinosaur street walkers $1.99 pants jackets socks boots lemons bananas avocados night more hoodies and gumball toy machines spit treasure tight pants keep falling off somehow streets belch used snack bags baby carriages shoves burritos into cigarettes shot ring everyones doorbells more stoops empty palm fronds crash eager for cement synchronize the mission of this mission”

Upcoming Buuck/BARGE events

Sunday 5/17 630pm: Reading w Juliana Spahr @ 21 Grand, Oakland.

Saturday 5/23 4pm: BARGE talk/performance w/Liz Glynn for General Projects @ Outpost for Contemporary Art, LA.

Saturday 5/30 4pm: BARGE closing performance & publication party @ Mission17 Gallery, SF.

Sunday 6/7: BARGE talk/performance @ Peace on A, New York (details to come).

Saturday 6/13 7-10pm: “Matta-Clark Parks” opens as part of “Leave the Capital” @ Root Division, SF.

17 Reasons Why: memory-mapping

From a visitor’s response to this prompt:

Please take a moment to write or sketch some of your feelings and/or memories about the Mission District. If you close your eyes, what can you recall of the neighborhood we’re in right now? How are such memories connected to the sights and sounds, the odors and tastes, the built structures and natural environment of the Mission? What feelings do such sensory details evoke? How would you describe the Mission District to someone who’s never been here? We will incorporate your contributions into our ongoing research and productions. Thanks for participating!

“An aquaintance—someone I used to see at parties at our flat on Dolores St. or around town from time to time—was shot in the head while on a pay phone in front of the York Theatre (now the Brava) one night in 1986. That marked the Mission for me. From that time on I could never wander around the neighborhood without a certain dis-ease. When we found an affordable apartment on Treat & 25th in 2003, I wandered the length of Treat, Harrison, Alabama, Florida, & 24th Streets before I realized—to my surprise—that I felt drawn to the neighborhood. I’ve never felt like that about any other place I’ve lived—& I’ve lived in more than 30 places… One morning I went to La Victoria for rolls and every building on 24th St was closed down. Except La Victoria. The neighborhood went on strike against Schwarzenegger criminalizing drivers licenses for undocumented residents. If this information could be so well known, and I was completely unaware of it, what claims could I make on my own neighborhood? I think I’m always negotiating this question.”

Thanks to whoever contributed this – more to come… 
DB 

               

Lorna Dee Cervantes’ “17 Reasons Why”

thanks Lorna!

Come see Lorna Dee this Sat, along w Alejandro Murguia & Michelle Tea…

Reason 12

(Thrift-town Poetics) (interchangeable T-shirt poem)

Because there are hidden codes, languages, and poetry in the everyday matrix of materials & signs that reveal occult meanings of the places & sites in which such texts suddenly appear and begin to ‘speak’…

How do seemingly anonymous and leftover goods carry messages into new contexts as they move through the class and cultural logics of thrift-store shopping? What new reading strategies, or new modes of materialist literary criticism, are required to begin to interpret these uncanny texts from the compost heap of U.S. consumer culture?

Recent iteration:

RISE

LifeLike

BYRD

Do good

Gamer

Dominican

FOX XOXO

Amber Asylum

Transact

LUCK

Konichiwa

I love being black

We Bleed Black & Green

Been There, Done That, Seen That, Bought Everything

I didn’t do it

YEAH / YEAH / YEAH

Overview

I write code.

TEST THIS

Control Freak

Season to Risk

Genuine

Rockets and Cars

Got Insurance?

Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy

Hoe / Hoe / Hoe

TOOL

Accrete

BARGE Reading @ Mission17: May 9 4-6pm

Please join Mission17 Gallery & BARGE at a special reading held in conjunction with the exhibit “17 Reasons Why,” an ongoing residency exploring the cultural politics of the Mission district, hosted by David Buuck & BARGE. Featuring the important Mission District writers Alejandro Murguía, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Michelle Tea. Come for prose, poetry, & conversation — hope to see you there!

Alejandro Murguia is a two-time winner of the American Book Award, most recently (August, 2003) for This War Called Love: Nine Stories (City Lights Books). His memoir The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California (University of Texas Press), has been nominated for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. His past books include Southern Front (American Book Award winner in 1992) and Volcan, Poetry from Central America. He was a founding member and the first director of the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. He also co-founded the Pocho-Che collective as well as the Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, and was active in the Mission District tropicalismo movement as well as the Nicaraguan Insurrection. He currently teaches at San Francisco State University.

Lorna Dee Cervantes’ first book, Emplumada, won the 1981 American Book Award, and was followed by From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, which won both the Paterson Prize and a Latino Literature Award, and the Pulitzer Prize-nominated DRIVE: The First Quartet. She was the founder of the important Chicano literary journal Mango, and co-editor of Red Dirt. After many years teaching at UC-Boulder, she is now back in the place of her birth, San Francisco’s Mission District.

Michelle Tea’s books include the novels Rose of No Man’s Land, Valencia, and The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, the memoir The Chelsea Whistle, a collected poems (The Beautiful), and the graphic memoir Rent Girl (with Lauren McCubbin). She was the co-founder of the Sister Spit spoken word tour & has toured with the Sex Workers’ Art Show. She has curated and edited many important reading series and anthologies, and writes for The Believer and The Bay Guardian.

Saturday May 9, 4-6 pm

Mission17 Gallery

2111 Mission Street @ 17th, 4th Floor