The San Francisco Art Institute Presents WRONG'S WHAT I DO BEST, Now thru 7/26

The San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), one of the most prestigious and oldest art schools in the nation, presents Wrong's What I Do Best, an exhibition transcending social, political and personal fault lines intent on provoking dialogue through the artists' fearless exploration of the deep and sometimes dark edges of our world. Working against both correctness and failure, Wrong's What I Do Bestrevels in repeated derailments to present the work of artists who commit themselves to unadulterated freedom of expression. Some of the artists unearth scorched histories or upset "natural" order, while others fling themselves headlong into the coming apocalypse. Characterized by illicit unrestraint and lack of critical judgment, the work occludes the artists' true selves.

Curated by Hesse McGraw and Aaron Spangler, Wrong's What I Do Best takes its title from what was originally a George Jones anthem, and later a catchall for a generation of Hard Country performers. Jones and his outlaw brothers-Johnny Paycheck, David Allan Coe, Hank Williams-were known equally for their crafted stage personas and unhinged private lives. These sincerely deluded, tragicomic figures inhabited characters of their own making, to personal peril and kindling for public legend.

"As our culture becomes increasingly polarized, and ideological extremes are presented as normal, Aaron and I looked for artists who assume real risks - even though they maintain the 'fourth wall' they also remind us one shouldn't let the truth get in the way of a good story," says Hesse McGraw, the exhibition's co-curator and SFAI's Vice President for Exhibitions and Public Programs.

The fifteen artists and collectives featured range from internationally celebrated figures to emerging talents. They include: Tanyth Berkeley, Ashley Bickerton, CLUB PAINT, Liz Cohen, Wim Delvoye, Samara Golden, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Nikki S. Lee, Brad Kahlhamer, Jonathan Meese, Laurel Nakadate, Dana Schutz, Aaron Storck, Marianne Vitale and Kara Walker.

The following quotes represent the variety of approaches and perspectives encompassed by the exhibition:

Tanyth Berkeley

"I imagined myself at times to be in the metaphorical position of an urban botanist searching for rare, perhaps even anachronistic, kinds of beauty. I wanted to relate my project to the natural world [which is] deliberately opposed to artifice. For example, the albino ladies I photographed are natural blondes-the real deal."

- Nicole Pasulka interviews Tanyth Berkeley for The Morning News, June 2006

Ashley Bickerton

"I'm interested in the liberating aspect of being totally untethered, let loose in the worst possible environments. My favorite artists are always women that do things that are so wrong... I like things to be seven kinds of wrong. If they are seven kinds of wrong, sometimes the wrongs neutralize themselves, and the whole thing becomes..."

- Emily Nathan interviews Ashley Bickerton for ArtNet

Liz Cohen

"I wanted to take something where I could go from being on the outside-really being an outsider, to really being an insider, even if I was a freak insider. Different ways to become a part of that car culture are to build cars, to own cars, or to model for cars. So my motivation for doing the modeling was more to become a member-I never did it to make fun of that aspect of car culture. I wasn't judging it, I was using it."
- Sarah Margolis-Pineo interviews Liz Cohen for the Bad At Sports Blog, November 2011

Wim Delvoye

"Art is not by definition morally good. I've never believed in justifying one's good heart or intelligence through art. ...It's a more efficient way to criticize the world. At first glance, people will think that I'm not politically correct... But I'm the one who, like Jesus, kisses Judas. I embrace the negative. Observers notice my contradictions at times: I'm a vegetarian, yet I have a pig farm."
- Nicolas Bourriaud interviews Wim Delvoye for Bing, May-Sep 2007

Samara Golden

"I guess that I hate the word cathartic, it is true that everything I do is very personal; however, I view my projects more as materialization problems... or even as math problems. They are like very long story problems that can only be solved by materializing the elements, and having them engage each other in very specific ways that then create a locked-in "answer." I feel that in order to make something happen in this way, one has to put their full self, and psyche, into it. The installations are full of my thoughts, interests, obsessions, and fears, but those elements are tools that I use to get to the larger whole. But to answer your question more literally, in some ways I see my installations as exorcisms."
- Vera Neykov interviews Samara Golden for Interview Magazine

Trenton Doyle Hancock

"In some ways my work is very connected to comedy and tragicomedy-taking the figure of the hero and exposing not necessarily its absurdity, but its vulnerability. My superhero is brave but not invulnerable. He uses his courage to move through all the layers of viscera that constitute his humanity. Being brave is just the armor he wears; he feels an obligation, in order to move through psychological and socio-political spaces and resolve issues. This time I'm using the artist as superhero as evidence that I don't know everything, that there is no script. I want to show that I'm not trying to cover up anything any longer."

- Paola Ferrario interviews Trenton Doyle Hancock for Art In America, April 2014

Nikki S. Lee

"All of my work so far has required the active participation of people. I think that's mostly because I like to work with the idea of identity and my views toward it. I think the other people were important for me to identify my own identity within the relationships with those people. In Buddhism there's a saying that goes something like "I can be someone else and that someone else can be me as well." Thoughts like this one-thoughts that cause you to view yourself in other people's shoes-were my main focus, so the people play a significant role."
- Interview with Nikki S. Lee for The Creators Project

Brad Kahlhamer

"...a lot of contemporary Native art really does come through and lives in academia and institutional structures, which I immediately, being somewhat oppositional to that, understood this as communities coming up and accepting what I would consider the limitations of that route. So, my idea then was to take a sort of non-communal approach and go completely wildcat, totally unauthorized, and let's see what happens. ...it is my position to locate a parallel community experience."
- Brad Kahlhamer lecture at San Francisco Art Institute, November 2013

Jonathan Meese

"In art you can never go too far. In art you have to go too far. That is the rule - if you are not willing to go too far, then you should stop. Then you are in a cultural funktionieren situation. We have to make sure that nothing bad is happening ideologically in the future, and that can only [occur] through art. We cannot counter, or be against, reality by reality. If we use reality to fight reality, we will end up in reality. In the bad reality that we fought against, as an artist, you should only want art to rule the world, or you, as an artist, should go home."

- Christian Lund interviews Jonathan Meese for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art YouTube Channel, January 2011

Laurel Nakadate

"As people who make things, we have the ability to think of the most vile, awful things we can imagine, but it doesn't mean we believe those things. I allow myself to go places in my videos that I would never go in my real life. And I think that there has to be that place where you can create and not have to be living it in real life. It's one of the problems in my work. It's a fabricated world."
- Scott Indrisek interviews Laurel Nakadate for The Believer, October 2006

Dana Schutz

"The paintings are not autobiographical. Only recently have I started painting some of the things in my life. I respond to what I think is happening in the world. The hypotheticals in the paintings can act as surrogates or narratives for phenomena that I feel are happening in culture. In the paintings, I think in terms of adjectives and adverbs. Often I will get information from people or things that I see, a phrase, or how one object relates to another. I construct the paintings as I go along."
- Mei Chin interviews Dana Schutz for BOMB Magazine, Spring 2006

Kara Walker

"I can't make this work if I don't feel something along those lines [of intense emotion]. I've definitely laughed or cackled out of absolute surprise at myself, and I have probably cried enough tears to flood the city. Shame is, I think, the most interesting state because it's so transgressive, so pervasive. It can occupy all your other, more familiar states: happiness, anger, rage, fear... It's interesting to put that out on the table, to elicit feelings of shame from others-"Come and join me in my shame!" It is a little peculiar."
- Matthew Harvey interviews Kara Walker for BOMB Magazine, Summer 2007

Wrong's What I Do Best is on view from Thursday, April 24 through Saturday, July 26, 2014. An Opening Reception will take place on Saturday, April 26 from 7 to 10 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and open until 7:30 p.m. on lecture nights. The exhibition will take place at SFAI's on-campus Walter and McBean Galleries(800 Chestnut Street), a premier space for the exhibition of contemporary art since 1969 as well as a hub for SFAI's lecture series, public programs and community education programs for youths and adults.

For more information about Wrong's What I Do Best, visit www.sfai.edu/wrong
For more information about SFAI, visit www.sfai.edu
For more information about the Walter and McBean Galleries and Artists, visit www.sfai.edu/walter-and-mcbean-galleries