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Jack Fischer Gallery

September 1 - October 9, 2011

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49 Geary Street Suite 440 San Francisco, CA 94108
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Confiscated TRAVELERS
This September will mark the passage of ten years since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bay Area artist Michele Pred’s work focuses on one of the most ubiquitous and tangible impacts of that day, the heightened security measures and restrictions enforced by the Transportation and Security Administration (TSA). Pred was employed as a limo driver at the time of 9/11, and was as a result directly privy to some of the anxieties that people felt in approaching air travel, including those who had had items confiscated while passing through security. Over the course of five months in 2002, Pred worked to obtain permission to items confiscated from the San Francisco International Airport. From these objects, Pred creates works that appear in the forms of national symbols of safety, pride, and comfort: hearts, red crosses, maps of the United States. For this exhibition Pred has also created a video documenting people recounting their personal confiscation experiences and how they feel about safety and air travel in 2011. Confiscated will serve as a questioning of the ways in which notions of safety, and by the same token, notions of what constitutes a weapon or a threat have changed since 9/11. Moreover, it will hopefully serve as a larger questioning. Just as security regulations that were initially resisted become the new standard in the way that people fly, what else is being tolerated or accepted in the name of safety? Michele Pred's artwork has been exhibited in galleries, art fairs and museums in London, Stockholm, New York, Bologna, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the 21st Century Museum, The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Di Rosa Collection in Napa, CA and is held in numerous corporate and private collections. Her work has been written about and reviewed in The New York Times, Art News Magazine, The International Herald Tribune, ReadyMade Magazine, American Craft Magazine, The Associated Press, PBS and CNN. Pred received her BFA from California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA where she also teaches.