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The 40th Street CutPost an Event »

Oakland Art Gallery

February 11 - March 21, 2009

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199 Kahn's Alley Oakland, CA 94612
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The 40th Street Cut
Artists Dylan Bolles, Keith Evans, Dianne Jones, Michael Meyers and Rich Spelker have produced a site-specific installation for the Oakland Art Gallery, incorporating book art, kinetic sculpture, video, sound, photography and multimedia elements. The 40th Street Cut, investigates the spatial histories of a section of Oakland’s urbanscape, particularly the overlaying linear systems of Glen Echo Creek and the current AC Transit “C” line, previously know as the Key System urban railway. In the 40th Street Cut, this collective of artists enter the realm of translating historical narratives and locations. They have sought to unearth layers of our urban folk histories and revivify, mythologize and abstract them into perceptual tools or effective new lenses. The geographical parameters of this exhibit encompass a small section of North Oakland between the Temescal and Piedmont Avenue neighborhoods, making a hybrid comparative investigation of the local watershed and transportation systems. Though largely covered over, these elements still give intrinsic character to the neighborhood and have an imposing relevance and potential. From 1903 to 1958, the Key System was a privately owned railway in the East Bay with six lines that served Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland, and Piedmont. The six routes converged in Emeryville and transported commuters to San Francisco on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. This project looks at the local section of the Key System now largely erased; but in its time existed as a unique urban landscape, and a piece of a public transit network that has disappeared. The locus of the collective’s research is situated between the split of the main artery of Glen Echo Creek and its forking Broadway branch; these defining areas of Oakland’s watershed are part of the lowlands. This is one of the last living creeks tucked away under limited ground exposure via culverts and drainpipes buried beneath homes, shops, hospital complexes, parking lots, and the busy current roads infrastructures. The watershed is an intrinsic system of movement and flux in the biosphere where deposits of vital elements of the microcosm, (mineral, fungus, slime molds, insects, seeds and pollen) are transformed and dispersed into the animal and human communities nearby. Encircled in an awareness of time, which is often hidden from our day-to-day concerns, are the remains of an effective part of the expanded idea of the transportation system in Oakland. The exhibition created for the Oakland Art Gallery is an environment that references these parameters and historical circumstances by setting up specific kinds of perceptual and/or spatial questions and conundrums in the language of a simulated environment. This multi-layered activity of framing social awareness begins with the translation of data from the collective’s research and the experiences of the neighborhood into an art environment of signs and language. The second being the installed environment- experienced and interpreted by the observers and participants to be a new unique landscape of wonder reflecting our community. the 40th Street Cut follows this collective’s first collaboration, Ballybaba, a large-scale installation created for the Richmond Art Center in 2005.