Contested Territories

Group exhibition curated by Kim Anno
Artists: Katie Dorame, Leila Weefur, Josef Jacques, Joyce Burstein, Yee Jan Bao, Wendy Liang, Kyung Lee

If there is an overarching theme that encompasses the last year (aside from COVID), Kim Anno’s exhibition Contested Territories is certainly a contender. The pandemic revealed the nation’s ongoing problems with race and ethnicity, wide gaps between socioeconomic strata and outdated structures. According to Anno, the theme of contested territories is a curatorial genre that explores the psychological and physical tensions of ideologies, from the political to ethnic to religious. Other exhibitions by the same title, such as Michael Amado’s 2012 exhibition at Dorsky Gallery, also explore these uneven spheres; however, Anno’s exhibition remains true to her commitment to engage local communities by including artists who have a history with California and who are subversive in their approach to these difficult subjects.

The featured artists—Katie Dorame, Leila Weefur, Josef Jacques, Joyce Burstein, Yee Jan Bao, Wendy Liang and Kyung Lee—excavate social structures through painting, photography, drawing and film/video. They use beauty, humor and seductive formal qualities to undermine inequity and scrutinize issues of racism, incarceration, homelessness, violence and identity. Katie Dorame and Leila Weefur subvert popular culture iconographies to excavate ethnic stereotypes and power dynamics. While others, such as Kyung Lee and Josef Jacques, are nuanced in their layered works about the homelessness crisis in Oakland and California’s history of incarceration. Joyce Burstein exhibits a monumental textile project, The Night Sky,  made of the stars of American flags abstracting patriotism into an existential end. Yee Jan Bao’s paintings are all empty saturated landscapes with provocations by small portraits, Asian and Black bodies, including families exhibiting both internal and external stress. Dreamy existentialism revs here as well. Wendy Liang’s watercolors use realism to paint pandemic anxieties and Asian identities. Art has a leadership role to play in collective social reckoning and these artists show us that art’s malleability is crucial to reach a large, diverse audience.

Kim Anno is a painter, photographer, and film/video artist whose work has been collected and exhibited by museums nationally and internationally. Her recent interests and expertise has been in the intersection of art and science, particularly in aesthetic issues surrounding climate change, water and adaptation. She is currently at work on "¡Quba!", her first feature documentary film, as well as "90 Miles From Paradise" film about adaptation to sea level rise for both southern Florida and Havana, Cuba. She is also working on a new monumental public art work at the San Francisco International Airport.

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