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Bonanza IV: EighteencharactersPost an Event »
“The first rule of naming a horse is that a name may consist of no more than 18 letters, and spaces and punctuation marks count as letters. Eighteencharacters is acceptable (and is, in fact, a registered horse name) but Eighteen Characters is not.” (From The Jockey Club Registry, established 1894)
Bonanza VI: Eighteencharacters examines the performativity of identity through stage names like those given to race horses –Midnight Lady, Mark of a Gem, Lil Swiss Echo. In consideration of the way naming attributes, masks, and alters meaning, stage names implicitly reveal the imitative structure and contingency of naming itself.
Similarly playful and strategic, Bonanza’s shifting interplay of sculpture, film making, and painting as individual pieces and/or one installation, examines contingency through a collapsing and continuity of work as a spirited partnership. As the distinctions between individual practices blur and the collaborative exercise becomes more concrete, the artists challenge the value of authorship and the fixity of identity by taking on their own stage name – Bonanza.
For their show at Interface gallery, Bonanza takes inspiration from the horse races at nearby Golden Gate Fields in Berkeley, “Where the Bay comes to play,” and the gallery's history as horse stables-turned carriage houses.
Back in the Saddle Again.
Bonanza is the collective practice of Conrad Guevara, Lindsay Tully, and Lana Williams. The formal cohesion of a film maker, sculptor, and painter is the result of their shared way of thinking and making. Bonanza centers around ideas of abstraction, questions authorship, and dismantles ideas of the heroic artist. They have exhibited at Artists' Television Access, n/a, and S.H.E.D. Projects in the Bay area.