Dream Jungle

The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Main Gallery is excited to present Dream Jungle , a dialogue with the novel by Jessica Hagedorn. This group exhibition curated by Matthew Villar Miranda, features new commissions and key loans by Alexa Burrell a.k.a. LEXAGON, adrian clutario, Al-An deSouza, Astria Suparak, and Carlos Villa, along with archival holdings from The Center for the Study of the Study of the Tasaday and the Jessica Hagedorn Papers at The Bancroft Library. Together the exhibition features artists who wield elements of performance to explore counter-ethnographies of the tropics, subverting colonial notions of the other. Taking its title from Jessica Hagedorn's 2003 novel, the exhibition explores the tangle of truth and artifice behind imperial representation. In the novel, Hagedorn stages two performances in the Philippine jungle: the media spectacle of a fabricated "Stone Age" tribe and the filming of a Hollywood Vietnam War epic. Drawing from this framework, Dream Jungle foregrounds the tropics as a zone of psychic and historical projection—where the colonized land and body are scripted, cast, and costumed for imperial consumption. Through installation, video, literature, and archival assemblage, the artists enact what Miranda calls "tropical counter-ethnographies": practices that seize the tropes of scripting, scoring, costuming, drag, fabrication, fore- and backgrounding, character building, scene-setting, and tableau to unsettle colonial modes of capture.