Recology Artist in Residence Exhibitions: Work by Dana Hemenway, Kija Lucas, and Alise Anderson

In her past projects, Lucas has used her keen photographic eye for details and curiosity about other people’s lives to draw out nuanced narratives about the seemingly mundane, whether a sentimental belonging, a species of plant, or bits of burnt wood. While the materials gathered at Recology are impossible to trace back to their origins and specific stories, she utilizes that same careful observation to momentarily reactivate these discarded objects and invites us to contemplate these collections as things, symbols, and carriers of hidden tales. The series serves as both a somber reflection of our times–offering us space to meditate on the loss and upheaval of the past two years–and a consideration of the glut of materials that we consume and throw away.

Kija Lucas’s work has been exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, California Institute of Integral Studies, Palo Alto Arts Center, Intersection for the Arts, Mission Cultural Center, and Root Division, as well as Venice Arts in Los Angeles, CA, La Sala d’Ercole/Hercules Hall in Bologna Italy, and Casa Escorsa in Guadalajara, Mexico. Lucas has been an Artist in Residence at Montalvo Center for the Arts, Grin City Collective, and The Wassaic Artist Residency. Lucas received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from Mills College.

Alise Anderson investigates and celebrates the mundanity and absurdity of ordinary objects, creating carefully crafted and subtly humorous works that blur the line between functional & nonfunctional and investigate the social bonds between us as we live in community. In French Toast Saved My Life, a new installation of sculptures developed while in residence at Recology, Anderson presents a seemingly familiar domestic interior with reconstructed furnishings and decor that suggest a desire for human connection. Anderson infuses the household objects in the installation with a sense of care and artistic labor, shaping the sculptures through a series of hand fashioned processes: weaving together mini blind slats to create a screen and pulping found papers for a variety of pop colored papier-mâché structures, including a shelving unit, a fragment of flooring, and a clock gone awry, its numbers tumbled to the side. This working of materials, and the resulting objects that teeter on the edge of the familiar, compel us to consider the possible inhabitants of this space and the ways their relationship may have been built and maintained in layers over the years.

Two pieces of transmuted furniture anchor the installation and hint at the speculative residents’ nuanced dynamic. The first, a pair of chairs connected by a sculpted runner between their front

legs would require those occupying the seats to sit in intimate proximity, but with one seat angled slightly askew, the chairs suggest one person’s unwillingness or inability to maintain direct eye contact. In the second piece, a table’s L-shaped feet have been turned inward, bracketing a space under the wooden top, giving a sense of relational ties tucked just under the surface. Taken as a whole, the works draw parallels between artistic and relational labor, both carried out with tenderness.

Alise Anderson received their BFA in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute, studied Modern Dance Performance & Choreography at Utah Valley University, and received a certificate in Directing and Producing from Berkeley Digital Film Institute. They have been an artist-in-residence at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles and was recognized through Outstanding Student awards from the new genres and sculpture departments at SFAI.