Event
My Mission PlaygroundPost an Event »
Adobe Books Backroom Gallery
January 9 - February 1, 2015Info
3166 16th Street San Francisco, CA 94103 Google Map »
Adobe Books Backroom Gallery is pleased to present My Mission Playground, an exhibition by artist Gordon Winiemko, opening January 9th, 2015. For his first solo exhibition in San Francisco, Winiemko is channeling the indignation felt by many long-time residents regarding the new wave of gentrification into a playful, confrontational, and above all thoughtful meditation on not only what’s going on in San Francisco and the Mission in particular, but also the societal values that are fueling gentrification and income inequality across the country. Winiemko, who lived in San Francisco for many years, uses his personal relationship to what many are considering a public crisis as a point of departure for a series of new performative video work created for this exhibition. He looks in on the nice young tech worker couple that is willing and able to pay three times the rent he used to pay for his tiny studio apartment, creating a portrait of how the city has changed. And, for the centerpiece of the exhibition, Winiemko turns the Mission into his own personal basketball court, drawing on sports as a metaphor for the “beat the other guy/winner take all” mentality that is imbricated in the American mindset. As he dribbles and shoots his way across the Mission, Winiemko affects an obliviousness to the niceties of the social contract characteristic of the gentrifier. At the same time, the artist references the apparent need to divide social and psychic space along oppositional lines like our team/their team, oppressor/oppressed, hero/douchebag.