SFMOMA Artists Gallery

Infix: The Grammar of Insertion revolves around the linguistic concept of the infix, and looks at the works of six Bay Area artists as infixes inserted within the language of the global art market. The show explores how these works and artists are changing the way we talk and think about art.

Organized by guest curator, Rico J. Reyes the show features the works of artists Renée Billingslea, E.G. Crichton, Lisa R. Gould, Willie Little, Lewis Watts and the artist collaboration, BARRIONICS (Lily Anne Perez, Johanna Poethig, and Rico Reyes). Including photography, installation, sculpture, prints, video, and performance, Infix assembles some of the Bay Area’s most dynamic artists working in these media and engaging in themes such as identity and gender, perception and humor, place and spectres, packaging and the grotesque, residue and culture.

Reyes challenges the beholders to spend time to think about how the arts in the Bay Area are articulated. Most often, Bay Area art is narrowly defined by its historical contributions to Abstract Expressionism, figurative painting, ceramics, and photography, or hyped by its surfacing underground scene; but mostly Bay Area art is confined to its perceived eccentric nature. From Thomas Albright’s, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980, to Johnstone and Holzman’s, Epicenter: San Francisco Bay Area Art Now, to Sidra Stich’s, art-SITES San Francisco, the grand narratives that describe the San Francisco Bay Area art hinge on the intersection of eccentricity and its sporadic contributions to past art movements, creating a set language, a fixed notion, that affects the continual development of Bay Area art and its articulation.