Isn’t Life a Blast: Celebrating Real Time Residency

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Becca Albee, Cliff Hengst, Colter Jacobsen, Connie Zheng, Constance Hockaday, Cristine Blanco, Jackie Im & Aaron Harbour, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Jessalyn Aaland, K.R.M. Mooney, Lexa Walsh, McIntyre Parker, Sholeh Asgary, Sofía Córdova, Torreya Cummings, Wilder Alison, and Will Rogan
 

Isn’t Life a Blast celebrates Real Time and Space (RTS), the Oakland-based artist-run studio, through the lens of its international residency program. Now in its thirteenth year, many of the nearly one hundred artists and cultural producers that comprise the residency’s alumni have left an indelible mark on the ecosystem of the Bay Area and beyond. 

The cross-section of artists presented here merge complex ideas with inventive approaches to materiality and place while imbuing their work with humor, absurdity, and curiosity. The exhibition’s tongue-in-cheek title (drawn from the work of past resident Jessalyn Aaland) aptly captures this tension between rigor, beauty, and play. It embraces the irreverent yet substantive character of RTS’s ethos that has made it such an essential undercurrent of the Bay Area art community.

In this way, the show feels deeply connected to the artistic legacy of Northern California—the Bay Area has long engendered a productive intersection of accessibility and criticality in art making—but contextualizes it against a more geographically expansive contemporary conversation. From painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video and sound to performance, social practice, publishing, archives, and more, the artists’ myriad processes demonstrate the breadth and reach of this seminal program and the resonance of the region beyond its borders.

Real Time and Space was founded by Emma Spertus and Mark Taylor in 2011. Former and current studio directors include Amy M. Ho, Nancy Bach, Lana Williams, Kico Le Strange, and J Rivera Pansa. Learn more about RTS and the residency program at realtimeandspace.org.

Isn’t Life a Blast is made possible with generous support from the Ruth Arts Foundation. 

The exhibition is curated by Amy Owen.