OOBLECK

is a new curatorial project in the Bay Area presenting discrete exhibitions, events and happenings:

/without a fixed format or location

/across disciplines and mediums

/exhibition as process, experiment, education and dialogue

/placing historical movements in conversation with contemporary art and ideas; activating archives through research and collaboration

CREATORS

Sidney B Russell

Rachael Cleaveland

Jacqueline Sherlock Norheim

Rachael Cleveland

is a movement-based performance artist native to and working in Oakland, California. With a background in dance, philosophy and landscape architecture her work explores perception at various temporal and spatial scales, from the personal to the ecological. She is particularly curious about demystifying dance by drawing on sound and everyday practices as expressive material available to all embodied life. Delighting in the haptic and ephemeral, she has performed on rooftops, in tunnels, parks and plazas. As one half of the performance duo ReadyMaids, Rachael has shown work at NOHspace, Z SPACE, Southern Exposure, and Pro Arts. She practices landscape architecture and teaches movement research, composition, and performance for all levels of experience in Oakland. She is currently pursuing training as a somatic practitioner.

Sidney Bacon Russell

is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. Moving between the formats of performance, happenings, painting and installation, her work is often produced in collaboration with dancers, poets, sound engineers and musicians. Constructing heightened sensorial experiences with saturated colors, rich sounds and textures, it comments on the pleasures and excesses of art in relation to the intellectual history of aesthetics and phenomenology. For five years Sidney worked with Marina Abramović in New York, building her archive, assisting in the production new works and collaborating with international museums and galleries to address the challenges of presenting historic performance art. Since her work in graduate school at California College of the Arts, Sidney has been ardently engaged with the history of early postmodern performance movements such as fluxus, the happenings, guati and Viennese Actionism, and has pursued questions in her artwork posed by the “dematerialized” archives that tell the story of those tenuous and ephemeral actions.

Jacqueline Sherlock Norheim

is a multidisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. Her work explores visual trickery and illusion through photography, painting, and sculpture. Images of the natural landscape and objects from contemporary life are folded and hooked together to create an invented space where things collide. Overlapping elements from her surroundings, she creates a sense of order that is punctuated by the chaos of nature. She holds an MFA from Mills College and a BFA from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She has been a resident artist at the Vermont Studio Center, Teton Art Labs WY, Wassaic Projects NY, and Helene Wurlitzer Foundation NM, and was a recipient of the Gertrude Murphy Fellowship in 2015. Her work has recently shown at Euqinom Projects, SF; The Franklin Outdoor, Chicago; OOBLECK, SF; Hashimoto Contemporary, SF; Embark Gallery, SF; Bass & Reiner, SF; and Dead Space Gallery, Brooklyn.

The word “OOBLECK" can be traced to a scourge of bad weather that descends upon the Kingdom of Didd in Dr. Seuss’s book Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949). A morality tale condemning selfishness, greed and despotic power, the story begins when King Derwin grows “angry with the sky.” The Royal Magicians are called to conceive a new weather, which they do by a clandestine alchemy. OOBLECK arrives: mischievously gooey, electric green, viscous, unformed, messy and disruptive. Generations of children have made their own OOBLECK by mixing cornstarch with water and food-dye to produce an odd, “non-newtonian” substance that has no obvious usefulness or purpose.