Hilma’s Room

October 11-December 15 2019
/slash/ gallery
687 Minna st, San Francisico

Hilma's /room/, an invitation:

In early February of 2019, I went to see Hilma af Klint’s exhibition at the Guggenheim. Her pioneering abstract work is astounding, created well before any works of the male artists presumed to be the progenitors of abstraction. Over a hundred years ago, she designed these paintings specifically to be part of a spiral temple, but how she engineered her epic post-mortem appropriation and consequent reinvention of the Guggenheim spiral is truly an art historical coup d'état. Her work, somehow, changed the building, and set in motion a reconsideration of the very institution that is the modern art museum. It made me both question the traditional narrative surrounding the emergence of abstraction and also Hilma’s agency in being retroactively thrust into the role of disruptor of the narrative. Is this what she wanted? Please join me in Hilma's /room/, where we will get to work on collaboratively editing the standard narrative of art history. I will be in residence and “perform” by showing images of Hilma’s show at the Guggenheim and printing out excerpts from Alfred Barr’s Cubism and Abstract Art and other canonical texts for us to edit and markup. The use of the /room/ is for me a metaphor for the rooms of the psyche. After seeing the Hilma show, I felt a strong sense of urgency to rearrange in my mind whatever is in there that is limiting my ability to create an inclusive narrative of art history. How we understand the past sets the context for the present and future. Thus Hilma's emergence for me is a mandate to co-create a new sense of time through re-coding the past. Since you have read this far, surely you must also be interested in working together to co-create a new template for the future of humanity. Mine is a Feminist Asia-Futurist vision. What's yours?

- Jessica Kung Dreyfus, San Francisco