Dear Catastrophe

Please join us for an opening reception of
Stephanie Mansolf's installation
"Dear Catastrophe"
and reading of members of Dodie Bellamy's prose workshop

Sunday, November 8, 2009, 2-6pm
at 4:00 p.m. readings by:

Lindsey Boldt
Mari Collings
Drew Cushing
Apsara DiQuinzio
Maizie Gilbert
Kevin Killian
Sara Larsen
Minnette Lehmann
Anne McGuire
Ron Palmer

Stephanie Mansolf's "Dear Catastrophe" will run from November 8-29, 2009.

Organized by Dodie Bellamy, "Dear Catastrophe" presents a series of Victorian styled treehouse dioramas - an imaginary cityscape - inhabited by humans, gremlins, and warrior cupids. Spike pits are layered in front of the treehouses, mountains behind the treehouses, clouds with battling cupids above the treehouses. In this layered landscape Mansolf explores how a space created for safety can quickly and easily become a threat. The treehouse city is inherently precarious, and its denizens are quickly falling into a chaos of disarray, danger, destruction, and death. Mansolf's startling dystopia draws on influences as disparate as the video game Mortal Kombat, the 1960's Disney film Swiss Family Robinson, and San Francisco's "painted ladies," the Victorian homes that adorn our streets.

Stephanie Mansolf received her BFA from UC Santa Barbara in 2006. During the end of her undergraduate studies Mansolf was commissioned in conjunction with artist Kat Trajano to transform Santa Barbara's chic Presidio Motel into an avant garde and eclectic art motel; a project from which the duo has received wide acclaim. Since then Mansolf has shown in Santa Barbara, San Francisco and Arcata California. Mansolf's practice delves into dark angles between reality and fantasy, investigating matters of human nature, disease, and hybridity through a manifestation of fanciful imagery. Employing gothic and surreal aesthetics, Mansolf creates a carnivalesque landscape where melodrama thrives, and taboo topics can be explored. She currently lives and works in San Francisco California.

FOR IMMEDIATE TIME-LAPSED RELEASE:

Right Window will present “PUNCTUATION: FOUR STOPS, TWO MARKS OF MOVEMENT, ONE GAP, SOME CONTINUATIONS, AND A STROKE, OR EXPRESSION OF THE INDEFINITE OR FRAGMENTARY” from October 4–25, 2009, with an opening reception on Sunday, October 4, 2009, from 2-8pm.


Curated by Chris Fitzpatrick and Kevin Killian, “PUNCTUATION” includes works by seventeen artists—Tauba Auerbach, Bonnie Begusch, Elisheva Biernoff, Deric Carner, Kota Ezawa, Marcella Faustini, Rachel Hornaday, Jason Kalogiros, Dustin T. Kelly, Jasmin Lim, Elyse Mallouk, Rebekah May, Sham Saenz, Carson Salter, Stefan Simikich, Snowden Snowden, Albert Sukoff—in a variety of modes: video; sculpture; artist’s books; painting; prints; a subtle intervention in a 1985 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle; viral typography; photography; vinyl text; The Moonwalk; oracular pronouncements; spatial interventions; theft; Braille; scripto continua; boustrophedon; a straight line drawn and followed.

“As for looking through the Right Window, those few practiced enough in the suspension of disbelief may, by way of their own conjuration, witness a boustrophedonic procession—a dramatic wrapping in forward and reverse of that transparent plane, in and around its glassy panes, until it has been densely inscribed with one pulsing ellipsis after another, over and through one peripatetic alien glyph after its other; for those artists whose works constitute this soothsaying display of wayward scrawl and shapely gates will have pushed every punctuation mark far from the printed page and, in turn, will have sucked them back in, so multiplied, available, and anew,” – L. Farnsworth O’Hara

During the opening, there will be a lecture about “Portable Holes” performed by Post Brothers and readings by poets Donato Mancini, Lisa Robertson, and Jordan Scott. A limited-edition publication produced on occasion of the exhibition will also be available.