Subversive Complicity: Critical Conversations in a Limo - created by Holly Crawford :: May 1, 2008; 5, 6, 7, and 8 pm :: The LAB, 16th and Capp St., San Francisco :: The limo will leave from and return to The LAB. Reserve your free space by calling the gallery at (415) 864-8855 :: Exhibition runs May 1-24, 2008 :: Opening Reception: May 1, 6-9 pm.

Hop into a white limousine with eight strangers to converse about anything in art for one hour. Hosts, who are critics and curators, will guide conversations and offer refreshments.

Featuring: Laurel Beckman; Chris Barr; Julia Bradshaw, James Morgan, and Bennett Goble; Elisheva Biernoff; Cesar Cornejo; Holly Crawford; Sharon Daniel; Bryan and Vita Hewitt with Chuck, Inc.; Heike Liss and Ellen Lake; Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry; Neighborhood Sign Club with Alison Pebworth, Leigh Ann Martin, and Megan Saperstein; Nancy Nisbet; Jennifer Parker with Matthew McGuinness; Sasha Petrenko; Johanna Poethig with VPA Painting and Mural Class, CSU Monterey Bay; Alyssa C. Salomon; Randy Sarafan; and Sherri Lynn Wood.

Subversive Complicity brings together a group of artists whose work inhabits the interstices of contemporary life — physical, temporal, and conceptual gaps within existing structures — in order to subvert everyday systems and raise social awareness in subtle, humorous, and radical ways. What happens when artists working within these spaces adapt and co-opt the strategies, languages, mannerisms, and visualizations from divergent social personas and cultural sources to create alternative modes of action and expression?

The resulting range of projects presented in this exhibition suggests the myriad of possibilities for public and private transformation to emerge when artists assume such diverse roles as agent provocateur, broadcaster, political activist, conversationalist, oral historian, engineer, broker, trader, benefactor, gamer, and even evangelist. Through gallery documentation of past actions and a series of ongoing and special events these artists invite audiences! into a set of conversations, resistances, and exchanges at once real and imagined, geographic and social, local and global.

Come join us in this exploration of how art can disrupt, re-shape, and otherwise invigorate our daily existence through interventions enacted on the streets of San Francisco, across the landscape of the Bay Area, and within other cities and virtual realities far beyond.

This exhibition was developed in association with the Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice Festival hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz. Critical Conversations in a Limo was organized by Heather M. Mikolaj (Curator) and Clare Haggarty (Assistant Curator), in collaboration with University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Dee Hibbert-Jones and E.G. Crichton.