April 20, 2017

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

San Francisco, CA–The Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco will host an exhibition and reception for current artists-in-residence Carrie Hott and Cybele Lyle, and SFSU student artist Nathan Byrne on Friday, May 19, from 5-8pm and Saturday, May 20, from 1-3pm. Additional viewing hours will be held on Tuesday, May 23, from 5-7pm, with a gallery walk-through with the artists at 6pm. This exhibition will be the culmination of four months of work by the artists who have scavenged materials from the dump to make art and promote recycling and reuse.

Carrie Hott
Summer Night Forever

While at Recology, Carrie Hott has taken apart familiar electronics to reveal their less familiar interiors. Focusing on equipment used to play recorded sound, Hott has removed the plastic casings from items including karaoke machines, cassette decks, and VHS tape players. Everything is still operational, but when pulled apart and rearranged, the guts of these machines–circuit boards, motors, and speakers–become small sculptural abstractions, each with its own voice.

The sounds that Hott has culled from the trash include recordings of whales and dolphins, a “summer night forever” white noise machine track, and a Joy Division mix-tape. Heard together, they create an unsettling audioscape of mediated nature and popular culture to accompany the e-waste landscape. Hott’s inclusion of lamps with colored bulbs, suggestive of bug zappers, adds to the darkly futuristic summer vacation vibe, and a preponderance of colored cords running throughout the work emphasizes the equipment’s complicated connection to, and reliance on, the electrical grid. In addition to the sculptural installation, Hott will present a series of drawn portraits on whiteboards of her electronic subjects.

Hott has been an artist-in-residence at Mills College, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Beta-Local in Puerto Rico. She has exhibited in the Bay Area at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Southern Exposure, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Krowswork Gallery, and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. Her Key Room, is a permanent commission for the Headlands Center for the Arts. She holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Arizona State University, Tempe.

Cybele Lyle
Are You Me or Are You a Stranger

During her residency Cybele Lyle has continued to construct the alternate visions of architectural space that have been a constant in her work. But, access to the Public Disposal and Recycling Area has provided the opportunity to engage with new materials, including objects from people’s homes and domestic spaces. Through this “taking on” of other people via their stuff, she investigates the more personal terrain of inhabited space. Creating a place to explore the edges of identity, Lyle finds meeting points, overlaps, and disconnects between herself and the people whose discards she appropriates, and, in turn, the potential for an expanded notion of self.

Lyle brings together found fabrics, including transparent and iridescent yardage, and recycled paint that she has used to coat both lumber and household objects in rainbow and metallic hues. Chairs also play a role, offering a place for symbolic, as well as literal, perspective on her work, allowing visitors to themselves inhabit the space and determine their own place within the work.

Lyle received an MFA in Painting/Combined Media from Hunter College in New York, a BFA in Printmaking from the California College of the Arts, and a BA in Environmental Studies from Oberlin College. She has exhibited in Bay Area venues including the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, the Oakland Museum, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her work is currently included in the 2017 California-Pacific Triennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. Lyle has participated in residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha. She has a studio at Real Time and Space in Oakland and is represented by Et al. in San Francisco.

I Wish I Knew for True:
12 Works by Nathan Byrne

During his residency, Nathan Byrne has created a series of sculptures that reference science and nature, and convey a sense of wonder and mystery about these realms. Byrne has worked with found objects that have scientific uses, such as glass slides, pipettes, insect specimens, and medical carts, as well as materials that have undergone decay or other natural altering processes, such as wood from barrels stained by wine. He has gathered multiples to create repetitive configurations suggestive of cells or other biological forms, and in some cases has made only minimal interventions in the materials he has found.

For a room installation of light and sound-based sculptures, Byrne has employed found neon signage, components from a Lite Brite toy, and other eclectic sources of illumination. Viewers can step into a metallic camper shell in which Byrne has drilled dozens of holes, recreating the night sky. Throughout all the work lies the suggestion of the personal within the scientific, and a sense of the magical, spiritual, or unknown.

Byrne will receive his BA in Studio Art from San Francisco State University in June. He has exhibited at the Euphrat Museum in Cupertino, Art Ark and Phantom Galleries in San Jose, and the Fine Arts Gallery at SFSU. He was curator of the On the Corner Music Art Program in Campbell, California, from 2011-2014.

Admission is free and open to the public, all ages welcome, wheelchair accessible.

About the Recology Artist in Residence Program
The Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco is a one-of-a-kind program established in 1990 to encourage the conservation of natural resources and instill a greater appreciation for the environment and art in children and adults. Artists work for four months in studio space on site, use materials recovered from the Public Disposal and Recycling Area, and speak to students and the general public. Over one-hundred professional Bay Area artists have completed residencies. Applications are accepted annually, June through August.

When:
Reception-Friday, May 19, 2017, 5-8pm
Reception-Saturday, May 20, 2017, 1-3pm
Additional viewing hours-Tuesday, May 23, 2017, 5-7pm with gallery walk-through with artists at 6pm at 401 Tunnel Avenue

Where:
Art Studio, 503 Tunnel Avenue and Environmental Learning Center, 401 Tunnel Avenue