PLAySPACE, The Paulette Long and Shepard Pollack Art Community Experiment, is an exhibition program currently located in the back of the Nave of CCA's Main Building at 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco. The program provides the resources for student artists and curators to conceptualize and present programming that is oriented toward the academic community. PLAySPACE was founded by CCA's Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice in 2005 and is currently administered by the Exhibitions & Public Programs department.

View installation images of highlighted PLAySPACE exhibitions 2016–2024

CCA's PLAySPACE Gallery invites you to close out the 2024-2025 academic year with Hallowed, a show of altars. Hallowed presents the work of Carolina Cuevas, Corinne Smith, Hannah Fhaye Oliver, Jes Young, and Lucile Henderson. The exhibition ventures to honor, recognize, and reflect the abundance of altars that have surfaced recently in art spaces in the Bay Area. Inspiration hails from Lucile Henderson's 2024 curatorial debut, In Reverence of the Feminine at Abrams Claghorn Gallery, where Henderson engaged audience participation with an altar. The importance of altars in art spaces was further concretized through Corinne Smith's 2024 installation at Museum of the African Diaspora, Silene Capensis, which also featured an altarpiece. Many more altars have been and will be made in galleries and museums, as artists muddle the boundaries between artistic and spiritual practice. Hallowed exists as a dot in this continuum.

View installation images of Hallowed

CCA’s PLAySPACE Gallery kick starts 2025 with vibrancy, texture, and tenderness in warp, the first exhibition this year. The pieces in the show dare to take up space and invite gallery visitors to do the same. Depending on the installation, we encourage you to touch, play, sit, or reflect on what warmth means to you. As you move through the gallery this January and February, consider how themes of vulnerability, healing, and heartfeltness can take culturally specific, abstract, or expansively personal forms. warp is proud to represent work from CCA’s MFA and BFA students, CCA alumni, Berkeley BFA, and local community artists.

Featuring work by Amy Lange, Angela Zamora, Blair Doss, Brielle Villanueva, Elizabeth Estrada, Kathryn Vercillo, Leo Pickard, Rowan Limbach, and Zedekiah Gonsalves Schild.

View installation images of warp

We construct tiny, tweakable, contained worlds. Impossible Microcosms takes as its inspiration the possibility that these miniature places we build exist beyond the reach of an audience, and even a maker. The pieces in Impossible Microcosms dramatize inaccessibility and play with a theoretical and material alienation of the viewer. Some pieces literally use boxes, walls, and other formal representations of nestling; others belong to elaborate fictional stories. Regardless, the works fulfill themselves. The implicit wills of their conceptions insulate them from our waking, walking world, a fact materially indicated by their scale. Locating the altogether-small in the gallery hardens the barriers between artifact and animal, exposing inherent yearnings in the works.

“…[E]xperiments in relative scale illustrate the dissonance that lies at the heart of miniaturisation, for within their intrinsic appeal is an understanding that they are not quite of our own reality[.]” This excerpt from “Worlds in Miniature” alludes to the unsettling implication that little things belong in little worlds beyond us.* Steward further exposes the emotional meaning of hyperbolic materiality in ON LONGING, where the micro and macro material cosmos objectify our desire. In this exaggeration, we project and process our “constant daydreams,” our obsessions, and, as in Impossible Microcosms, our nightmares.**

*Davy and Dixon, “What Makes a Miniature?”, WORLDS IN MINIATURE, p1

**Steward, Susan, ON LONGING: NARRATIVES OF THE MINIATURES, THE GIGANTIC, THE SOUVENIR, THE COLLECTION, p54

PLAySPACE Gallery's fall 2024 season gives itself over to uncanniness.

The opening show of the season, Long Lost, reconciles the work of past and present students, transforming the gallery into a homecoming venue. The reunion inspires questions of memory, distortion, home, inaccessibility, and distance. As a composed exhibit, works from current students (such as Angela Zamora, Haley Mae, and Eve) and alumni (including Narges Poursadeqi, Djinnaya Stroud, and Ashley Martin-Prideaux) complicate interpretations about childhood, family, safety, and collective experience. This refusal of neat returns and easy answers reflects the precariousness of pasts, homes, and histories.

The subsequent show, scheduled to open in late October, builds on the notions of home and strangeness/estrangement that Long Lost unearths. It will collect small works and the art of miniatures to position viewers externally; their gaze existing outside looking into homes, spaces, experiences, and interiors at large.

Image credit Narges Poursadeqi, still from Fragile Memories (video).

View installation images of Long Lost

Giorgie O'Keeffe DePaolis (they/them) is a second year graduate student in the Visual and Critical Studies (MA) program at CCA. O'Keeffe DePaolis recognizes creativity as a means to connect people, build relationships, and foster solidarity. Their curatorial debut in April 2024 showed them the potential for exhibitions to produce a gathering table for artists and amplify important local voices. Curatorial, O'Keeffe DePaolis collaborates with artists to display works that source inspiration from mythology, ancestry, memory, intimacy, mystery, and other alternative epistemologies. Academically, their research investigates how visual aesthetics emerge from DIY art scenes in San Francisco, contextualized by the City's bohemianism and history of economic stress. Each of these pursuits is a part of a larger goal to cultivate joy and sincerity in a strangely changing world.

Contact

For visitor information, please see CCA.edu/exhibitions

For information on current and upcoming events, visit the CCA Events Calendar, instagram, or facebook, or contact playspace@cca.edu.