New year, new shows. Check out what’s coming up in the first half of 2014 at ASC Projects!

/// Through January /// Live/Work: An Alternative Showcase

ASC Projects is pleased to present Live/Work: An Alternative Showcase, a group exhibition about living with art and artists making a living, with works and wares by Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Craig Calderwood, Kristen van Diggelen, and Smith|Allen.

As the art world attempts to inflate yet another economic bubble, many artists continue to take matters into their own hands, finding creative ways to make a living with their inherent skills and talents. One of the oldest forms of this (though a controversial one in recent decades) is the fine craft business. In the style of an interior showcase, Live/Work features five artists whose commercial wares directly reflect the creative vision, craftsmanship, and conceptual rigor of their contemporary artworks, highlighting both their commercial craft, as well as their content-driven gallery works.

/// February /// Hold Your Breath: Aideen Barry and Lauren Kelley

ASC Projects presents Hold Your Breath, an exhibition of video works by Aideen Barry and Lauren Kelley. Through the unique medium of stop-motion, Barry and Kelley create quiet narratives of isolation and panic, present stories of suburban anxiety, and explore failure and decay in all its glory.

Using herself as subject, Aideen Barry’s work is sited in investigations into Hysterical behavior and unsettling repetitive gestures of what she calls the “dystopian domestic”—the perfection paranoia of the suburban housewife, where domestic duties become an endurance performance and banal tasks are exhaustingly difficult.

Inspired by the malleable nature of young minds and the twisted intricacies of immature adults, Lauren Kelley fashions her “actors” from childhood toys—animating expressions and movement with applied clay, and fabricating surroundings with found materials like bubble wrap and hair gel.

Presented together, these women tie an anxious string between the and dark humor of their own experience and an uncanny resemblance to our own insecurities.

/// March – April /// ASC Live Residency III: Geri Montano

ASC Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Geri Montano, following a 2-week live residency in the project space where she will create the majority of the works in the exhibition.

Montano has participated in a variety of art practices including political street theater with Praxis Artists where she designed costumes and performed. The group formed in Seattle after the World Trade Organization citizen uprising. Inspired by personal experiences relating to socio-political and feminist themes, Montano’s work juxtaposes aesthetic qualities with subversive imagery; combining aesthetic, thematic and technical skills, Montano impresses emotional and powerful ideas on the viewer; never shying away from controversial or taboo subjects.

Geri Montano was born in Colorado. She is a multiracial contemporary artist emphasizing her Native American heritage; Dineh (Navajo) from her father’s lineage, French, Spanish and Comanche from her mothers. Montano has been an artist all her life, but received her formal art education from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1997, graduating with a BFA in interdisciplinary arts which included drawing, painting, and sculpture. The exhibition is supported in part by the San Francisco Arts Commission.

/// April – May /// Unmasking the Network // Guest Curated by Ben Valentine

Seeking to investigate and expose our hyper-connected world, artists featured in Unmasking the Network are pushing our understanding and imagination of the structures and institutions affecting us all. These networks are incredibly powerful yet intensely resistant to description and these misunderstandings are creating a poor grasp of what is really going on.

Guest Curator Ben Valentine is a strategist and writer for The Civic Beat as well as a culture creator/critic/curator deeply excited by the intersection of creativity, new media, and journalism. After living in New York City for two years where he worked as a writer and artist assistant, Ben moved to the Bay Area seeking a compromise between his passion for social work and art. Ben has curated for the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; co-curated the Tumblr Art Symposium; written for Hyperallergic, Salon, and Idiom Mag; and was a curatorial intern with Creative Time.

/// June – July /// E Leder: New Video Works

E Leder’s work is visually aesthetic, conceptual and formal. The work concerns itself with the tensions inherent within the medium of video itself: It’s seductive nature, the flickering light, the voyerism, the acts of looking and being seen, the power of the gaze. Her work focuses on recontexualizing gender and the socially agreed upon constructs that hold up our gender and sexuality systems. Her solo exhibition at ASC Projects coincides with the Framline Film Festival and is supported in part by the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Leder has shown work at film festivals and galleries internationally including: The Sundance Channel, Tampere International Short Film Festival, Frameline, The New Festival, Mix NY, Outfest, South By Southwest, New York Expo of Short Film and Video, Pence Gallery, SOMArts Cultural Center, Milk Gallery, Euro Underground Film Festival, and Art Matters, among many others. Born in New Orleans in 1964, she received an MFA from UC Davis and a BA from Hampshire College. Leder is a winner of San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant, The Princess Grace Award, a New York Expo of Short Film Jury Award, Freedman-Gadbury Award, and a Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Award. Leder is a founding member of the lesbianfilm collective and has been making video based art since 1991. She lives and works in San Francisco and is represented by ASC Projects.

/// July – August /// ASC Residency IV: Rodney Ewing

ASC Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Rodney Ewing, following a 3-week live residency in the project space where he created the majority of the works in the exhibition. Ewing’s drawings, paintings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and events. With his work he is pursuing a narrative that requires us to be present and intimate.

Ewing has presented solo exhibitions at IcTus Projects and Frey Norris Gallery, and his work has been included in numerous group exhibitions locally and nationally, including the San Francisco Public Library; Beta Pictoris Gallery in Birmingham, Alabama; Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco; Johnsonese Gallery in Chicago; Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland; Performance Art Institute in San Francisco; and the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara. He was nominated for the 2013 Eureka Fellowship, has been a nominee and a semi-finalist for the SECA Award, and was nominated for Bay Area Now in 2008 and 2013. He has garnered critical attention in publications such as Art News, Art Week, Artillery Magazine, and Black Arts Quarterly, among others. With a Bachelor of Fine Art in Printmaking from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, and a Master of Fine Art from West Virginia University, Rodney Ewing lives and works in San Francisco.

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For more information on these or any other ASC Projects exhibitions, visit ascprojects.org or email asc@asimplecollective.com.

ASC Projects is located at #104 on Treat Avenue at 18th Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. We are open Tuesdays and Thursdays and readily by appointment.