Note: McEvoy Arts reopens to the public on Wednesday, August 5, 2020. Free, timed-entry reservations are available to book in advance or upon arrival in limited quantities. For more information on McEvoy Arts' admissions policies, please visit mcevoyarts.org/visit.

Late twentieth-century art as a platform for individual projection has inaugurated an aesthetic of ambiguity which permeates contemporary examples of cultural reflections. Guest curated by Steve Polta and informed by the resonances of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in the exhibition and Issue #235 of Aperture magazine, certainty is becoming our nemesis presents works that trace the blurred boundaries of self-expression and how ambiguity of identity manifests as an emotional survival strategy.

From the continuous dissolve of bodies in Alice Anne Parker’s Riverbody (1970), to the biometric facial recognition of Zach Blas’ Facial Weaponization Communiqué: Fag Face and the lush visualization of intergenerational transgender identity in Zackary Drucker’s Unison (2013–2017), the program probes the rich, strange, and provocative canon of contemporary self-expression in film, foregrounding the expansiveness of the self in relation to recently mainstreamed discourses on the fluidity and malleability of gender and identity. New media technologies and conditions of time and place give shape to these artworks.

In Issue #235, Maggie Nelson assesses the prescience of both Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel and Sally Potter’s 1992 film in light of “how the once essential search for a definable, and immutable, identity has become stifling to our sense of development and the possibilities of finding true fellowship with other complex, variously wired, hesitant sensitive beings.” While flirting with notions of timelessness and perpetuity, the works in certainty is becoming our nemesis refute notions of stability and offer radical gestures of intimacy.

The program runs daily in the Screening Room at the top of the hour.

FEATURED ARTISTS
Zach Blas
Nazli Din­­çel
Julia Dogra-Brazell
Zackary Drucker
Pere Ginard
Rosa John
Alice Anne Parker
Rajee Samarasinghe
Karly Stark
Antoinette Zwirchmayr

ABOUT THE CURATOR
Steve Polta is a writer, archivist, historian, and Director of San Francisco Cinematheque where he has worked since 1998. He is the co-founder and current curator of Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS film festival, founded 2010, now presented annually at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2014 he was awarded a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for the study of contemporary and historic performance cinema which resulted in Perpetual Motion, an extensive series of live cinema performances presented in San Francisco in 2016. He holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from San José State University. He is co-editor with Brett Kashmere of Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! documenting the film and curatorial work of the Bay Area artist to be published in collaboration with Incite: A Journal of Experimental Media in 2020. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.