Calendar

KSW programs and events

Thursday, October 2, 6:30-10:00pm

Kearny Street Workshop and Locus Arts Wedding

Kearny Street Workshop and Locus Arts are getting married! To celebrate the merger of our two great organizations, we request the honor of your presence at our wedding!

The wedding ceremony will be held at Poleng Lounge, immediately followed by a reception. A cake cutting ceremony, money dance, and bouquet toss are among the much-hallowed wedding traditions that the newlywed organizations will be performing. Featuring music by DJ Roxy, flowers courtesy of Choppy Oshiro and Hal Souza / Bow-K, and wedding cake donated by Kim Le of LeCouture Cakes.

In addition, you, our guest are invited to participate in the festivities! Join the fun with:

• Wedding costume contest: Get decked out in your best bridesmaid and groomsmen outfit, and compete for a chance at winning a VIP ticket to KSW's December Gala!
• Free wedding favors for the first 50 guests

When: Thursday, October 2 - Doors open 6:30pm, Ceremony 7:00pm

Where: Poleng Lounge, 1751 Fulton St @ Masonic, San Francisco

Gifts:$15 donation requested
Or visit our online gift registry at amazon.com
Click through to Amazon.com and go shopping! KSW will receive a percentage of all sales referred from the KSW website.

Wednesdays, October 8 - November 12, 6:30-8:30pm

Tala & Raga: Rhythms and Melodies of Indian Classical Music

Wednesdays, October 8 – November 12, 6 – 8pm

Join Robin Sukhadia and Gautam Tejas Ganeshan in a six-session joint exploration of the twin classical musical forms of India - Hindustani (North) and Carnatic (South).

Each two-hour session will introduce students to the elements of Hindustani and Carnatic music - from the basics of rhythm and melody to more advanced concepts like compositional forms and improvisational styles, to some of the interesting approaches to the art as a spiritual practice that characterize the overall Indian classical approach. We'll also explore contemporary manifestations of these traditional art forms, such as their use in films and electronic music, as well as their continuing evolution in the hands of modern artists.

A significant portion of the class will be devoted to learning the basics of tala (rhythm) and raga (melody) through studying tabla (north Indian classical drums; a limited number of drums will be available during the class), vocal recitation of rhythmic patterns, singing, and clapping time cycles. Absolutely no prior experience is required; Participants should expect extensive interactivity, listening sessions, video screenings, experimentation with concepts rooted in classical Indian music, and an open environment designed to demystify some of the world’s most ancient music.

Click here to listen to an interview with both instructors on KALW's Crosscurrents.

GAUTAM TEJAS GANESHAN BIO

Founder and director of the Sangati Community Center for South Asian Music in San Francisco, a nonprofit performance venue for weekly public chamber concerts of Indian classical music, Gautam performs thoughtful, creative vocal music at the threshold between Indian classical music and its source – the source of all music – the natural world of sound, the harmony of proportion, the pristine, eternal beauty of patterns and the mind, and the complex eddies of human experience and emotion. Gautam has guest-lectured on Carnatic (South Indian classical) music for the Music of India courses at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and in 2004 was awarded two significant grants for the academic study of music - the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, issued by the U.S. Department of Education.

ROBIN SUKHADIA BIO

Recently completing a Master in Fine Arts in World Music at the California Institute of the Arts, Robin has been studying tabla under Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri at CalArts and the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California for the past six years. For the past 5 years, Robin has traveled internationally on behalf of Project Ahimsa, an organization committed to empowering impoverished youth through music education. He has taught workshops and lectured at UCLA, Pomona College, the University of San Francisco, and at Eagle Rock Professional Development Center in Estes Park, Colorado. In April 2008, he successfully completed a tabla-centric Artist Residency at the Machine Project, Los Angeles. His writings on music education and creative process have appeared in Hyphen Magazine, the Subcontinental, India Currents, and Saathee Magazine.
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SANGATI CENTER

The Sangati Community Center for South Asian Music, located in San Francisco's Mission District, is a 501(c)3 non-profit performance venue that hosts unamplified public chamber concerts of Indian classical music every week in a ground-floor street corner gallery and performance space. Supported by concert attendance, memberships, and donations, the Sangati Center invites you to attend an upcoming concert in our intimate and acoustically alive room. More information and a complete concert calendar can be found online at www.sangaticenter.org.

Tuesdays, October 14 - November 18, 7:30-9:30pm

Writing to Remember with Aimee Suzara

In this workshop, we will use creative writing exercises and theatre-derived activities to dislodge the stories in our memories and our bodies. Oral history, culture as passed through generations, and various types of storytelling and recording will be explored, including poetry, journaling and performance. The six week workshop will culminate with an individual project and a final reading/performance.

Filipino-American writer/performer and educator Aimee Suzara uses poetry, theatre and movement to explore themes of home, migration and the body. Her play, Pagbabalik (Return), was awarded the Zellerbach Community Arts Grant in 2006 and 2007 and she has been published in the NAACP-nominated Check the Rhyme: an Anthology of Female Poets and Emcees (Lit Noire, 2007) and in several journals. Her poetry chapbook, the space between, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2008. Suzara coaches youth and adults in poetry and performance and teaches English at City College of San Francisco and Laney College. www.aimeesuzara.net.

This event is supported by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.

Registration fee is $225.
To register by check, please send a check or money order for full amount to:
Kearny Street Workshop, 180 Capp Street #5, San Francisco, CA 94110
and include your full name and contact info.

Or register online by clicking the button below:

October 25, 2008 - January 23, 2009, space180 Gallery

Shifted Focus: 10th Anniversary APAture Retrospective Exhibition and Performance Series

Design by Michael Yap

Visual Art Exhibition

Gallery Hours: Wed-Sat 3-6pm

Featuring: Christine Wong Yap, Kevin B. Chen, Binh Danh, Rajkamal Kahlon, Michael Arcega, Kana Tanaka, Rebecca Szeto, Jenifer K Wofford, Mark Baugh-Sasaki and Weston Teruya.

Curatorial Statement

APAture/Aperture: the linguistic similarity between the title of Kearny Street Workshop’s multidisciplinary arts festival and the light-controlling camera opening is not a coincidence. This purposeful play on words refers to APAture’s mission of exposing local emerging Asian Pacific American visual artists, writers, musicians and performers to a larger Bay Area audience and discourse. This retrospective is in celebration of not only the substantial duration of the festival and KSW’s long history of artist support, but also of ten APAture alumni who have significantly contributed to the dialogue of contemporary art practice in the Bay Area and beyond. In reflecting back over a decade of APAture festivals, we have chosen to also look forward by selecting new works by each artist, many of which have never previously been shown. Looking at the diverse selection of artistic practice represented in this exhibition, APAture’s ever-present homonym and its own meanings and interpretations came into play throughout our experience with the works. An aperture is an opening, a stop, a passage, and an optical control. It dictates what we see and how we see it. The artists featured in SHIFTED FOCUS have all produced work that functions as interpreters of our common surroundings. While in the past many have looked inward at issues of identity, now they are looking outward at the world and investigating it through various vantage points—by zooming in, dissecting, inverting, or filtering through a critical or historical lens.

Kevin Chen’s painstakingly rendered cityscapes titled The View From There, examine the spatial experience specific to the landscape of urban California and the unobstructed moment of viewing the skyline from afar. His drawings capture and stretch the moment of calm--typically over in an instant as we speed down the freeway or over a bridge—when still far outside the chaos of the dense urban system.

Kana Tanaka uses sculpted glass to create unique encounters with the visible phenomena found in daily life. Her glass lenses interact with the available glass of the gallery window and the light filtered through it to shift the viewer’s perspective of the world outside the space in which they stand.

Christine Wong Yap’s painting Lorem Ipsum takes a closer look at the Latin text often used for mock-ups in graphic design layout. The words we are accustomed to seeing as random filler text are juxtaposed with the original passage from which they were extracted and jumbled beyond recognition. By looking back to the original Latin text, Yap exposes the true poetic nature of the passage, which speaks to the essential human experiences of pleasure and pain.

In his installation On the Way Up (lub 300) Weston Teruya utilizes objects associated leisure, protection, and access found in daily life as means of an ongoing investigation into the societal dynamics of sites of privilege and control. The raft is as an instrument of rest and relaxation, yet it is also as a portable built environment demonstrating control over nature. The barrier offers safety, but also denies perhaps rightful admission.

Mike Arcega’s customized barrier tape makes a subtle alteration to the letters in the word typically printed on the side of the common yellow warning marker—caution. Auction is a comment on the use of artist donations in fundraising art auctions. The tape sections off a portion of the gallery creating a self-conscious space that we cautiously walk around while simultaneously questioning what we are being cautious of.

Rebecca Szeto’s steel wool drawing Gross Domestic Product (Props for a Market Crisis) challenges common belief structures, specifically that of the correlation between accumulation, security, and the American dream. The image, which Szeto borrows from Goya, portrays a figure with an amassment of material property balanced on her head nearing collapse. The standard household cleaning aid is utilized to represent both the strength and vulnerability of steel—over the course of the exhibition the drawing will slowly disintegrate and its transform its physical structure.

Mark Baugh-Sasaki grafts industrial material with organic components in response to the human tendency to force natural surroundings into a preconceived idealized image. In Phototropic Response, the tree, trained by the human, will to respond to the artificial and grows toward the television’s representation of sky—away from the natural light of the window.

In The War and Peace series, On-going (collection of such materials until the day I die) Binh Danh explores his fascination with not only the subject of war, but also the use of the daily newspaper headline in announcing its beginning as well as its end. Danh saved his first newspaper front page on September 11, 2001 and has since searched through the archives of numerous daily publications to examine how these extreme opposing announcements have been communicated through the similar aesthetic of bold typeface on newsprint.

Rajkamal Kahlon addresses the rift created between the images of war and the actual corporeal experience of war in her multimedia work Aktion with a Male Body: Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada. In looking at the body and how it has transformed “within historical moments of crisis,” Kahlon speaks to the detachment that has formed within the one thing that is closest to us all—our own bodies—and attempts a recovery from this separation.

Jenifer K Wofford’s prints, from the Art on Market Street Kiosk Poster Series commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission, tell the story of fictional Flor Villanueva, a young Filipina immigrant living in San Francisco. The images function as visual vignettes illustrating select moments throughout a six-year span of her life. The prints, which are stylistically reminiscent of the illustrations of graphic novels, are part of a public poster series titled Flor 1973-78 and are installed in kiosks along Market Street so as to be randomly encountered by pedestrians. Like the images, which capture mundane moments in the life of their subject, the public placement allows for the story to insert itself into the daily routine of San Franciscans.

Ellen Oh and Sally Szwed, Curators