Superficial Matters: Artists from the Svane Gift and Beyond
Christiane Lyons, Wesaam Al-Badry, Sunny A. Smith, Stephanie Syjuco, Ruby Neri, Maria A. Guzmán Capron, Daisy May Sheff, Lorna Simpson
de Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118
Tue-Sun 9:30am-5:15pm
Admission
Paid Admission
Requires museum admission ticket; see ticketing link
About
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.