Portrait of the Artist Just in Front of their Favorite Place, 2023. Photo credit: Ástríður Jónsdóttir
Dates & Times:
ad infinitum (Fuck John J Clark)
At CNMAT
Thursday, January 25th, 7 - 9 pm
Sunday, February 11th, 4 - 6 pm
ad infinitum (Togetherness) in Collapsense
At the Worth Ryder Gallery (Anthropology + Art Practice Building room 116)
Opening reception: January 24th, 4-7 pm
Exhibition dates: January 24 - February 14, 2024
Closing Reception and Catalogue Release: February 14th, 4-7 pm
ad infinitum is a multimedia installation exploring intimate relationships between large and small scale hierarchies, ecological understandings, and mis-appropriations through the projection of the human image upon the landscape of the “Far West.” In ad infinitum multi-channel sound, photography, painting, and video engage the possibilities of ecstatic resonance and integration, amongst remnants of the colonial logic inherent in the former “American frontier”, and across two locations on the UC Berkeley campus as a part of the 2024 first year MFA exhibition, Collapsense.
At CNMAT, ad infinitum (Fuck John J Clark) explores how the racialized and gendered identity of the ‘White Male’ projects itself onto the environment. Field recordings and photographs encourage the viewer through distortions of signification, as well as through themes of surveillance, generational inheritance, and ecological and historical inter-connectivity.
In the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, paintings, video and sound explore the process and possibilities of integrating these themes into new topographies through improvisation.
Zekarias Musele Thompson (they/their) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Oakland, CA, and Reykjavik, IS who is interested in humanity’s conceptual and emotional organizational structures and how we bring them into material form. Their practice seeks to create containers that support our ability to navigate emergent psychosomatic responses through deep listening and close attention. Through sonic composition, spatial facilitation, photography, collaborative group practice & performance, writing, and mark-making, they intervene with entrenched historical narratives around individual and collective self-deception and embodied trauma.
Zekarias has presented work at venues including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Lab, Museum of the African Diaspora, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Land and Sea, and Eternal Now in the Bay area — as well as Associate Gallery, Ásmundasalur, and Open in Reykjavík, Iceland. They have performed and collaborated with artists such as Pétur Eggertsson, Salimatu Amabebe, Zack Parrinella, Phillip Laurent, Benjamin Rodgers, Ástríður Jónsdóttir, Joshua Wismans, Lonnie Holley, Zachary James Watkins, Claire Fleming Staples, Cory Todd, James Wallace, Miles Lassi, and Jessica Ackerley.
Zekarias is an instigator of the Musele Project, a sound, image, performance, and facilitation practice that encourages deep, empathic listening, and a co-founder of Working Name Studios, a collectively owned and organized arts institution with the mission of building institutional stability and equity for underrepresented creative practices, ideas, and people.