The Plastic Exploding Inevitable an installation by Christine Wertheim
Right Window at ATA
992 Valencia at 21st Street, San Francisco
Opening: September 7, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
At 6:00 Christine Wertheim will talk and answer questions about the project
Installation continues through October 3
Coral reefs the world over are dying faster than rain forests. In homage to these vanishing wonders, Margaret and Christine Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring instigated a project to crochet a woolen reef, an effort that now engages women around the globe. This collective testimony also celebrates the strange hyperbolic geometry of the oceanic realm. As it has grown the reef has spawned, dividing and growing into multiple sub-reefs, each with its own unique ecology of corals, anemones, kelps and other sea life.
In September Right Window will be showing the Plastic Exploding Inevitable (PEI), a spawn of the Toxic Reef, aka Bikini Atoll, made from plastic bags and other refused and recycled materials. The most psychedelic of the Institute for Figuring reefs, the Plastic Exploding Inevitable features irradiant pink “sand,” miniature white plastic spires, a grove of wine-glass trees, and a gorgeous reef panorama painted on a take-out box by Alicia Escott. In the decades since Warhol created his Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the multimedia component of the Silver Factory, the words he strung together have taken on a more sinister edge, and Wertheim’s installation helps us parse this new reality. In the North Pacific, for example, there is a gyre of floating plastic debris roughly the size of Texas.
Contributors to the Plastic Exploding Inevitable include:
Kathleen Greco, Sarah Simons, Evelyn Hardin, Alicia Escott, Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim.
The Right Window at ATA is curated by Dodie Bellamy for the month of September, 2008.
When she is not crocheting reef items, Christine has a full-time job in the Department of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, where she teaches experimental writing and feminism. She is also an experimental poet and writer whose work deals with the intersection of language and logic. Christine’s first book of poetry,
+’Ime-S-pace, was published in 2007 by Les Figues Press, LA.
Image from Margaret Wertheim’s Flickr
August 26, 2008
Saturday, AUGUST 30 @ 7:00pm, Elizabeth Robinson…
Last reading of the Bay Area Poetry Marathon 2008 series.
Readers include…Edward Foster, Myron Hardy, sara larsen, Michael Nicoloff, Elizabeth Robinson, Cynthia Sailers, Jennifer Scappettone, Matthew Zapruder
THE LAB, 2948 16th Street (@ Capp), San Francisco
1 block from Mission BART stop
$3 admission
August 9, 2008
Make/shift
Make/shift—a magazine creating, documenting, and engaging with contemporary feminist culture and activism—is seeking submissions for its fifth issue (spring/summer 2009).
Issue 4, due out in September, will feature “Without You Who Understand: Letters Between Radical Women of Color” (a special section guest-edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs); a multi-article spread on feminist/cooperative economics; an excerpt from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s forthcoming novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly; notes on solidarity among queers and feminists in the U.S. and Nicaragua; report-backs from the WOC Lockdown at the University of Michigan and the gender-justice convening in Oakland; and moving personal and photo essays about young women and sexuality. As always, there will be new columns by Randa Jarrar, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Nomy Lamm, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore; extensive book, film, and event reviews; and much, much more.
For Issue 5, we are seeking
–investigative journalism
–photojournalism
–critical essays
–personal essays
–profiles of feminist activists, artists, projects, and thinkers
–fiction and poetry
–art and photography
–book, maga/zine, film, art, and event reviews
–hybrid pieces
We are also seeking content for the following regular make/shift features:
–Everyday Actions: scenes of feminist action in everyday life (200 to 400 words; theme TBA)
–Documents: documents of feminist discourse in progress (doodle-covered meeting minutes, e-mail exchanges, and the like)
–Make/Plans: listings for our international calendar of upcoming events (submit info for events occurring between March and September 2009)
–Participate: listings for our community bulletin board (calls for submissions, invitations to participate in community projects, and the like)
Make/shift pays $.02/word plus two copies.
Send pitches or full-draft submissions to info@makeshiftmag.com. Please submit no more than three poems or two pieces of prose at a time. Feel free to pitch multiple ideas at once. We accept pitches and submissions on a rolling basis, but priority for Issue 5 will be given to those received by September 1.
***
Support independent feminist media—subscribe to make/shift: http://makeshiftmag.com/subscribe.htm
Be our friend: http://www.myspace.com/makeshiftmag
Join our group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2233928781