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RFCL Art
Exhibit at Gallery Cafe
Art Show in Gallery Cafe in San Francisco
1200 Mason St
Feb, 2009
Visit Gallery Cafe |
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A new exhibition in San Francisco featuring the art of Radio Free Clear Light. Come check out new
photographic works during the month of February at the Gallery Café, right across from
the Cable Car Museum. RFCL pushes the edge of coffee-shop decency to bring out subversive
hints of ephemeral light and darkness.
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The small intersection is crowded with white haired monkeys weighed
down by the cameras dangling from their necks and lifted by the grinding of steel wheels
that spin incessantly, as they have for decades, moving the electrons through and about,
sending these monkeys up and down the hills of the windy city.
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The constant dinging of clear-sounding bells never lets
us forget their presence, and I watch as the people cling to the golden poles, watching
from invisible windows as the stacked apartments of long vanished Dutch and English
immigrants pass by at three miles an hour.
I watch as they pass, me in my car, the local, as
local as a wanderer can become, because the thought of leaving rarely crosses my mind.
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The stark reality hits me like a small slap on the face with a tiny
leather glove: me, in this café, hanging rather large pieces of art, large for the
present reality of our experiments, this is what locals do. I cannot do this out of a
backpack, I cannot do this without resources and help and the aid of a trusty car that
shuttles us from here to there.
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The café's walls are pockmarked from years of nails
until somebody came up with an idea in the middle of the night and rigged up their hook
and wire system. The walls pull in on themselves, concave in small spots, almost
imperceptible until we get intimate and hover inches from the hard skin, pushing our art
onto its blankness.
I yearn for a brush and a gallon of paint.
I wish for the smell of brain melting fumes and the freshness that comes from a clean wall
without coffee stains and finger smudges.
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But there is no paint, and I remind myself that my job is to move
forward with what we have brought.
With tape and wire, we mount the walls with images from another
world, a different world that is yet very much like this one.
Blue and orange and colored in the light of our attention, the
tender gaze from our eyes.
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The tree, the shower, the bed, the orange fruit, they
hang now, taken out of their moment of movement and breath and immortalized by the lens of
time and 1s and 0s that flash back and forth in infitinite variation.
They are made to live once again, with colors and
filters and jagged lines, only to be frozen again, until the computers crash and the
memory of our lifetimes fade with the cities that will crumble with the coming floods and
winds.
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And maybe there will be other pictures then, taken with cameras that
go by other names and bodies that emit other variations of carbon, and whisper in other
tongues and they will create art by another name and perhaps, for another purpose.
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Take a thousand pictures, gaze upon the rotting
carcass of our metropolis and document the crumbling of my body and the eating of my
brain.
Take a thousand clicks and turn them into a thousand colored moments.
They will stand,
in the spaceships of your journey,
remembered perhaps,
within the shallow space
of one second to another,
where the little bits of eternity stand still,
waiting for another tender caress
from an unknown attentive eye.
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