Nicki Green & Ricki Dwyer
Pillars of Earth / The Way Nets Cannot Hold Water

Exhibition Dates: Saturday, July 18th 2020 – July 26th 2020

By appointment only. Mask attire necessary.

Guerrero Gallery is pleased to present Pillars of Earth / The Way Nets Cannot Hold Water, two exhibitions by Bay-Area based artists Nicki Green and Ricki Dwyer, held in a backyard in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood. Within this untraditional space, the artists call forth a materially rich universe in which works interrelate and are interdependent, yielding a range of questions relating to our systems of value and control, the connections between organisms and objects, and our place amidst grander universal forces.

Pillars of Earth sees Nicki Green exploring the Tahara–purity rituals in Judaism that prepare the dead for burial. This project arose from a conversation with a trans member of a Chevra Kadisha (“Holy Community” or death and dying ritual contingent), in which the artist was surprised to learn that Home Depot’s iconic orange 5-gallon buckets were commonly used in washing rituals. Instead of seeking to alter these pre-fabricated vessels into a form that felt more exalted, Green instead created ceramic pillars that would literally raise these buckets from the ground, forcing the viewer to reconsider our systems of ascribing value and what we deem as holy. Referencing such disparate sources as the Mormon Baptismal Font which features a pool resting on the backs of twelve oxen, Green’s pillars take on the shapes of fungi, a form that’s repeated throughout the artist’s work, acting as a rich symbolic marker–an organism that navigates the spaces between the living and the dead. Mounted along the surrounding fence is a ceramic alcove, a form that functions simultaneously as painting, frame and vessel, serving as both an interruption of space and a fluid response to the rigidity of the columns. The alcove revels in the raw materiality of clay and questions our desire to create structure with a material that is inherently malleable and so often resists our every impulse to control it.

Ricki Dwyer’s The Way Nets Cannot Hold Water, folds together a larger composition of works through a grouping of pieces that are both singular and intimately dependent on one another. The work came from a place of frustration with identity politics and the losses of intricacy and nuance at the hands of constructing monolithic genres of being, a sentiment echoed in the exhibition’s title which references a Pablo Neruda line in which the author decries all that is lost as we attempt to communicate through language. Dwyer’s use of disparate materials and forms yields a space in which objects are contrasted by and defined against one another. A sagging cloth sail rusts as salt reacts with the air, limply held by ropes, the top strung through an oversized pulley and the lower tied around a cleat, both objects crafted in an earthy red terracotta. A giant turnbuckle connects to the sail, a functional replica of hardware used in channeling water from the Mt. Tam watershed into Marin County. And a cloudy translucent basin suspended by chains, holds a frozen mass of ice, slowly melting as a corner of cloth hanging from the basin carries the melted water in a rhythmic drip to a Home Depot bucket supported by Green’s pillars below. From the elemental phase changes of ice becoming water and eventually evaporating, to the proliferation of rust as a fabric dye, to the consistent pull of gravity in molding these slouching forms–Dwyer’s works are intimately shaped by forces which compel us to reflect on our own place in the cosmic order as we’re dwarfed by larger systems at play.