Exhibitions have the strangest life cycles. They accrete invisibly for months or years before surfacing suddenly, often with very little explanation about how they’re meant to be consumed. Then, within a few weeks of opening they become inexperienceable. Aside from slim photographic evidence, it’s as if they never existed. The witnesses are stuck saying some variation of “you had to be there” when trying to convey their value.  

While discussing this and other paradoxes about hosting shows, it occurred to Max Blue and I to create a non-existent exhibition of objects that also never existed by artists of a similar nature. Not being complete assholes, we engaged writers K.M. Soehnlein and Dean Rader to flesh out the fabrication and produce a catalog. We also worked with world class craftspeople to create a limited edition box set of the descriptive texts. And lastly, we put wall labels in our gallery to hold empty space for the fictitious artworks. In short, this “fake” show has become as real or realer than any we’ve had before. The hope from our standpoint is that it gives us a closer understanding of what an exhibition is for, while ever so slightly pushing against the boundaries of what an exhibition can be. 

-Bass & Reiner

Max Blue who wrote the parts for Max Myers & Aporia Francesco, writes about the visual arts and modern culture. His criticism appears in the San Francisco Examiner and Hyper- allergic, among others, and his fiction has appeared in Your Impossible Voice and Mount Hope, among others. This is his first curatorial project.

Dean Rader who wrote the parts for Lee D’Arthur, has authored or co-authored eleven books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, named a Best Book of the Year by the Barnes & Noble Review, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Recent work appears or will appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Harvard Review, BOMB, Southern Review, Narrative, Zyzzyva, Best of the Net and many others. At present, he is collaborating with the calligrapher Thomas Ingmire on a series of unique artist books that merge text and image. His next collection of poems, Before the Borderless: The Cy Twombly Cycle, is forthcoming in 2023 from Copper Canyon Press. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco where he has won the Dean’s Medal of Excellence, the University’s Distinguished Research Award, and a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Society of Collegiate Scholars. 

KM Soehnlein who wrote the parts for Zack Jones, is the author of Army of Lovers (forth- coming Fall 2022), a novel set against the backdrop of the AIDS activist movement in New York City. His previous novels are The World of Normal Boys, You Can Say You Knew Me When, and Robin and Ruby. He is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award (fiction), Henfield Prize (short fiction) and the SFFILM/Rainin Foundation Grant (screenwriting). An editor and arts writer, his journalism has appeared in San Francisco Magazine, Out, Village Voice, 7x7, and Queerty, and he has written audio tours of exhibitions at SFMOMA, the Seattle Museum of Art, and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. He teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.