Niki Ulehla’s jewelry and small puppets are about control and the illusion of it. She’s making something so fucking small that you have to pay attention, they demand you slow down and actually see them. In a world screaming at maximum volume, Niki’s working in whispers. These aren’t just tiny baubles or pocket-sized marionettes. They’re a middle […]
Continue Reading →These photographs. Bodies bent, faces caught mid transmission, that particular quality of light that happens when people stop performing and start doing. This is what happens when you take two traditions that refused to lie and smash them together in a room in San Francisco. Look at that close up, the woman’s face split open […]
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Niki Ulehla went to the San Francisco dump, not to throw something away, but to find something, and she pulled Dante’s entire cast of the damned out of discarded lumber, scrap metal, and abandoned leather, carved them into marionettes, and staged the Inferno right there among the mountains of our collective waste. This is the […]
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The title: I Am America. As if the work itself is saying, this howling, this reaching for something beyond commerce and comfort and the whole sick machinery, this is what America actually is when you strip away everything false. And the Workcenter doing Ginsberg in a gym, that quintessentially American space of humiliation and aspiration, […]
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What we’ve got here is the whole beautiful fucked up contradiction laid out at ankle level. Those heels, man. They’re not asking permission, they’re not apologizing, they’re just there in the frame like some kind of manifesto written in sequins and fuck you platform architecture. This is what happens when the theater of identity stops […]
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Vericocha… is dying. Not in some romantic, poetic way, but in the way all good spaces in the Mission are dying now, rent creeping up, city breathing down their neck, same old San Francisco story of things that matter getting squeezed out for things that pay. It’s one of those spots you walk past a […]
Continue Reading →The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is not a squat, not a nightclub, not someone’s living room where furniture gets shoved against the walls and something unrepeatable happens at 3:12 AM. It’s a museum. White walls, institutional lighting, the whole architecture of cultural legitimacy. And somehow, impossibly, the Workcenter agreed to bring Electric Party […]
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