1275 Minnesota St /
Rena Bransten Gallery
Sydney Cain: Dust to Dust
Artist Reception | Saturday, December 4, 2021 | 4–6 pm
Rena Brantsen Gallery is pleased to present Dust to Dust, Sydney Cain’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, organized to coincide with her show Refutations at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, and her large-scale commissioned mural Radio Imagination which is on view as part of Mothership: Voyage into Afrofuturism at the Oakland Museum of California. A catalog will be published to accompany the gallery exhibition with an introductory essay by Angela N. Carroll.
The works which comprise this exhibition are Cain’s excavations into memory and liminal spaces. Their creation includes an intuitive sifting, rubbing, and erasing of black pigments and metals to reveal personal mythologies which exist beyond mainstream and colonial narratives in a process that is as much an investigation as a manifestation. The shadowy figures which populate Cain’s images, usually found in groups, are not “set” beings – their histories and messages are as intangible as their facial expressions. In communing with these enigmatic entities, Cain seems to be inviting them to exist in the present by reaching both backwards and forwards in time simultaneously to find them, until the very notion that existence is tethered to linear time becomes suspect.