Femina Potens

‘Under the Big Top’ Opening Reception at Femina Potens

FREAKISHLY CARNIVALESQUE VAUDEVILLIAN PORTRAITURE MEETS AERIAL PERFORMANCE ART INSTALLATIONS AT FEMINA POTENS

‘UNDER THE BIG TOP’, VISUAL ART INSTALLATION

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – APRIL 4, 2009 7-10pm– Femina Potens invites you to experience the circus like you never have before.  Our April exhibit invokes a deliciously deviant curiosity for the magical and absurd.  “Under the Big Top” explores the awe and wonder of circus performance, featuring decadently painted aerial acrobats, pretzel-like contortionists and fire breathing phantoms pushing their appearance and bodies to the upmost limits.

Join us April 4^th from 7-9pm, as we celebrate marvels and enchantment at the opening reception of “Under the Big Top”. We proudly welcome Anja Ulfeldt, Catherine Murty, Gabe Scelta, Kally Kahn, Rachael Jablo, and window installation artist Lilea Duran to the Femina Potens circus tent.

As a unique and scintillating treat, Local Installation Artist Catherine Murty will be collaborating with aerialist Sonya Smith to create a spectacular interactive light sculpture that will be suspended from the ceiling.  Smith will perform throughout the month:

Opening night (April 4th 7:45)

Saturday April 11th 12:30-1:30pm

Sunday April 19th 4:30- 5:30pm

Saturday April 25th 12:30-1:30pm

We welcome all circus freaks to the center ring at Femina Potens.  Opening Reception April 4th, 2009 7-10pm. Show Runs April 4 – 26, 2009.

For more information visit http://www.feminapotens.org/

‘Under the Big Top’ Visual Art Exhibition

April 4 - 26, 2009 7-10pm

Femina Potens Art Gallery

2199 Market Street

San Francisco, CA 94114

On Facebook? Please RSVP here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=72178906738

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Anja Ulfeldt received her BFA from California College of the Arts in 2002. Anja lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area exploring photography, sculpture and experiential art forms. Her    photographic work shows us a word within our world where anything can happen and things are not as they seem. Her images are both familiar and strange while leading us into a realm of surreal experience. Anja has participated in shows in science museums, collaborated with local circus groups, and been featured in galleries in the Bay Area, London, and  New York. She manages an art studio in Oakland as well as a successful photography business.

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Catherine Murty has a BFA in sculpture and site specific installation from the San Francisco Art Institute, which included a yearlong exchange to the Rietveld Academy of Art in Amsterdam. In her spare time she works on motorcycles.

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Gabe Scelta: Painting, to me, is a science, is a way of making sense of the world, of breaking things down into basic shapes, colors, and moments.   I’ve been drawing and painting since childhood, and in 2002 received a BFA from Boston University. When looking at models, I look for the space between, framing models in ways that are unexpected. Crafting images of the human body is always satisfying to me because it is always new. While we are all fundamentally the same, everything is different upon closer inspection. I work quite deliberately, consciously employing both traditional and innovative techniques. I enjoy a colorful palette and studying how background colors seep into subjects. Smaller works are gouache on paper; this medium allows the pigment to sit on top of the paper, allowing for the brightest of colors. Some of my larger pieces are oil on paper, where pigment is literally floating, suspended in oil, even when dry, giving it an almost human glow.

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Kally Kahn studies fine art, photography and and graphic design at San Francisco City College and throughout the bay area.  Coming from a background of theater and dance she often works with choreographic staging, props and movement in collaboration with the people that she photographs.Through working at the caberet/circus show Teatro Zinzanni many fascinating and talented circus performers have intersected her life.

Rachael Jablo was raised in a darkroom, and got her first camera at age 6. In 2003, she participated in a performance art circus in Havana, Cuba, where she developed an insatiable curiosity about all things under and behind the Big Top. Today she lives in San Francisco, but is photographing circus tents around the United States, exploring their structure and color, and how these variables act to confuse the indoors and outdoors.

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A lifelong athlete, Sonya Smith discovered dance at Macalester College while earning a degree in Biology and Environmental Studies. Since moving to the Bay Area, she has become a principle collaborating member of Eat Cake Productions, creating quirky, feminist aerial clowning, and Lizz Roman and Dancers, a site specific, modern dance company. Additionally, she has performed with Project Bandaloop, Kim Epifano/Epiphany Productions, and Zaccho Dance Theater, among many others. Smith’s choreography, presented in Portland, Kansas City, and San Francisco, combines aerial apparatus, modern dance and contact improvisation. In 2006 she was awarded a residency from the Jon Sims Center for the Arts to create innovative, site-specific aerial dance work.  The Cable, The Fire Escape and the Elevator Shaft highlighted the unique theater space, including the windows, the fire escape entrance and the freight elevator into the work. Smith worked and lived at 848 Community Space and coordinated construction of its new space and identity, CounterPULSE, in the SOMA district of San Francisco.

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About Femina Potens: Femina Potens (http://www.feminapotens.org) is a nationally recognized art gallery and performance space dedicated to the advancement of women and transgendered artists since 2001.

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Sponsored by the Queer Cultural Center with support from California Arts Council, San Francisco Arts Commission, the Zellerbach Foundation and Grants for the Arts.  Femina Potens is a leading queer organization in San Francisco, and has been featured on the LOGO channel, Q-Television, Bitch, Bust, Spread, Brian Alexander’s book “America Unzipped”, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the San Francisco Chronicle where Violet Blue called Femina Potens, “the most happening art space in the city; a revolution in art and sex.”