11 October 2024 at 6:30pm
Christopher Robin Duncan, Shana Lopes (assistant curator, SFMOMA) and Sean McFarland (photographer) will discuss Duncan's practice, which utilizes photographic processes, and his most recent publication, Poems (published in 2024 by Deadbeat Club, Los Angeles).
Known for his textile and sound work, Christopher Robin Duncan recently turned to photography, rediscovering with a simple and sincere pleasure the medium that he had, for a while, set aside. Marked by the question of time, and informed by an intuitive, direct relationship with natural elements, Duncan's practice unfolds anew using photography. Using a half frame camera which, by dividing the film in two, doubles time and space by the same action, Duncan creates interstices—the time of a heartbeat, of a fraction of a second—into which he slips, moves imperceptibly, creating suspended moments.
Christopher Robin Duncan's exploration of natural elements and their relationship to time is evoked in Poems and continues with a large-scale commissioned artwork as part of the CCA Wattis Institute's inaugural exhibition, All This Soft Wild Buzzing, curated by Jeanne Gerrity and on view at the Wattis' new location from October 19 through December 14.
Participant Bios
Christopher Robin Duncan lives and works in Oakland, California. He received his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 2003 and his MFA from Stanford University in 2013. He has had solo exhibitions at Pt. 2 Gallery, Oakland (2024); Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco (2023; 2020); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton (2022; 2019; 2016); Eighteen Gallery, Copenhagen (2020); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2018); and Headlands Center for the Arts (2016); amongst others.
Duncan's work has been included in group exhibitions at The Wattis Institute, California College of Arts, San Francisco (2024); San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery (2022); Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha (2019); Susan Inglett Gallery, New York (2018); the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) (2018); and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery (2018); amongst others. Duncan has been in residence at the Space Program, San Francisco (2023); Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito (2015); ACRE, Steuben (2012); University of Kansas, Lawrence (2012); and Kala Institute, Berkeley (2010) amongst others.
Shana Lopes, PhD, is an Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA. Born and raised in San Francisco, she has curated or co-curated exhibitions such as Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue, Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection, A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA, Sea Change, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, and the upcoming 2024 SECA Art Award. Over the past fourteen years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Sean McFarland is an artist from California. His photographs, sculptures, drawings, videos, and books examine records of experience, time, landscape, and spirituality. McFarland lives in San Francisco and teaches at the School of Art at San Francisco State University.
McFarland earned an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BS from Humboldt State University. His solo exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Visual Studies Workshop; San Francisco Camerawork; and White Columns. Group exhibitions include the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; George Eastman Museum; Aperture; Bay Area Now 6, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Milwaukee Museum of Art. His work is in the permanent collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; National Gallery of Art; George Eastman Museum; City and County of San Francisco; and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
His awards include the SECA Award - SFMOMA, the Eureka Fellowship, the Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer, and the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship.
