Hunker Down

3/18/2016 - 4/23/2016

PRESS RELEASE

Bass & Reiner Gallery is pleased to present Hunker Down, featuring new works by Mie Hørlyck Mogensen and May Wilson for the inaugural exhibition at 1275 Minnesota Street. Responding to the untouched gallery space, Mogensen and Wilson have prepared the gallery for its future inhabitants–art viewers, art workers, and art objects–through a temporary installation of sculptures.

In Hunker Down, Mogensen has created a cast of sculptural characters: the Coast Guards and Body Guard, lumbering bodies which try clumsily to create a space of safety, and the Optimists, anarchistic ceramic forms that fight or rebel against guardianship and the illusion of security. Wilson also envisions her sculptural forms as characters, with each piece acting as a tentative explorer in our new space. Created with mass produced materials of obscure provenance, the pieces are imbued with human characteristics–leggy, awkward, vaguely optimistic–they also repel through their delicately achieved balance and dangerous materiality.

Inevitably, safety is revealed to be a delusion of those who try to impose it. No space is safe. Comfort leads to death. Security cannot be guaranteed.

Mie Hørlyck Mogensen (b. November 29) is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Investigating how function determines form, Mogensen creates new and never before seen objects and their functions, her work is an invitation to a game where everything can happen at her say. Her practice moves seamlessly between sculpture, drawing, and video. After receiving her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2013, she returned to Denmark and was awarded the 2014 KE-Prize from Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling. Her work has also been exhibited extensively throughout California including shows at Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Los Angeles; City Limits Gallery, Oakland; Root Division, San Francisco; and The Torrance Museum of Art, Torrance.

May Wilson (b. November 29) is based in San Francisco, currently an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts. Wilson works within a set of self-imposed limitations. Using industrial materials, economy of means and finite time, she creates time based, three dimensional sketches. Wilson received her MFA from University of California Davis in 2013. That year, she was awarded a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a graduate fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts and a Center for Cultural Innovation Grant. Her work has been exhibited at the di Rosa Foundation, Napa; CULT: Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco; Aggregate Space, Oakland; Sonoma Art Museum and Creative Alliance in Baltimore; among others.

Curated by Emily Ebba Reynolds.

Selected Press

Shotgun Review, Hunker Down, Danica Willard Sachs, Art Practical, April 2016

New Minnesota Street galleries boost SF art scene, Charles Desmarais, SF Chronicle, March 2016

Hunker Down: Mie Hørlych Mogensen and May Wilson, Monica Westin, SFAQ, April 2016