Superficial Matters: Artists from the Svane Gift and Beyond

This exhibition is the third in a series highlighting contemporary artists with close ties to the Bay Area. 

The featured artists mine the material possibilities of their chosen mediums, from ceramic to photography to painting, to explore the surfaces of bodies and objects as critical sites of identity formation — especially in relation to womanhood. 

Christiane Lyons represents womanhood as a collage of multiple identities through painted portraits that splice different subjects into a single plane. In his Al-Kouture photographic series (2018), Wesaam Al-Badry repurposes silk scarves by luxury fashion brands into niqabs to tease out the tension between Western and Arab-Islamic ideologies. The patchwork table cover in Sunny A. Smith’s Tilt-top Table (Scattergood) (2013) brings attention to the ornamental role placed on women in the domestic sphere. 

The works on view play with distinctions between the ornamental and the authentic, the deep and the superficial. ​

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website