Catharine Clark Gallery presents "Juncture," featuring work by Indira Allegra, Sandow Birk, Lenka Clayton, Michael Hall, Deborah Oropallo, and Stephanie Syjuco, on view June 3 -July 22, 2017.

"Juncture" considers the imperative relationship between art and political response, as well as the ethical responsibilities of representing vulnerable communities in visual culture.

Indira Allegra is a recipient of the Oakland Individual Artist (2015) and Queer Cultural Center grants (2014) and has been honored with the Jackson Literary Award (2014), Lambda Literary Fellowship (2012) and Windgate Craft Fellowship (2015). Allegra's commissions include works for the SFMOMA, de Young Museum, The Wattis Institute, SFJAZZ Poetry Festival, the City of Oakland and the National Queer Arts Festival. Her time-based works have screened at festivals such as MIX NYC (2013), Perlen Hannover LGBT Festival (2010), Bologna Lesbian Film Festival (2010) and Outfest Fusion (2009).

Allegra’s writing has been widely anthologized, she has contributed works to Cream City Review, HYSTERIA Magazine, make/shift Magazine, Konch Magazine and Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought among others. In 2014 she was the Dr. and Mrs. Ella Tag Lecturer at East Carolina University and a Lylle Parker Women of Color Speaker at the University of Oregon. Allegra has completed workshops and residencies at The Banff Centre in Canada (2012) Ponderosa Center for Movement and Discovery in Stolzenhagen (2016) and Takt in Berlin (2016). She is a 2017 Artist in Residence at Djerassi Residence Arts Program and the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Sandow Birk is a well traveled graduate of the Otis/Parson's Art Institute. Frequently developed as expansive, multi-media projects, his works have dealt with contemporary life in its entirety. With an emphasis on social issues, frequent themes of his past work have included inner city violence, graffiti, political issues, travel, war, and prisons, as well as surfing and skateboarding. He was a recipient of an NEA International Travel Grant to Mexico City in 1995 to study mural painting, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, and a Fulbright Fellowship for painting to Rio de Janeiro for 1997. In 1999 he was awarded a Getty Fellowship for painting, followed by a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Fellowship in 2001. In 2007 he was an artist in residence at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, and at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2008. His most recent project involves a consideration of the Qur’an as relevant to contemporary life in America.

Sandow is represented by the Koplin del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, and P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York City.

Lenka Clayton is an artist and founder of An Artist Residency in Motherhood. Her interdisciplinary work considers, exaggerates, and alters the accepted rules of everyday life, extending the familiar into the realms of the poetic and absurd.

In previous works she has hand-numbered 7,000 stones; searched for all 613 people mentioned in a single edition of a German newspaper; filmed one person of each age from 1 to 100, and reconstituted a lost museum from a sketch on the back of an envelope. She and writer Michael Crowe are currently in the middle of writing a unique, personal letter to every household in the world. For three years she was the world’s first Artist-in-Residence-in-Motherhood after she founded a fully-funded artist residency that took place inside her own home and life as a mother of two young children. On Mother’s Day 2016 An Artist Residency in Motherhood became an open-source project, there are currently almost 300 Artists-in-Residence-in-Motherhood in 31 countries on six continents.

In 2017 Clayton and collaborator Jon Rubin debuted a major new work ...circle through New York commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum that takes place at the Guggenheim and in five other locations in a circle throughout the city including a pet store, a church and a Punjabi TV station.

Clayton’s previous work has been widely exhibited including at FRAC Le Plateau in Paris, Kunstmuseum Linz in Austria, Kunsthalle St. Gallen in Switzerland, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Anthology Film Archives and MoMA in New York City, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, the Tehran International Documentary Festival, and on BBC Radio 4 and Channel 4 Television in the UK. Her work has also appeared in Frieze, Creative Nonfiction, Esquire Russia, The Daily Telegraph, The New Yorker blog, The New York Times, and in the publication "Typewriter Art" amongst others.

Clayton has received a Pittsburgh Foundation/Heinz Endowments Creative Development Grant, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and in 2014 was presented a Carol R. Brown Award for Creative Achievement. She has taught at institutions in the U.K., US and Sweden and in 2008 was the Theodore Randall International Chair at Alfred University in New York. From 2014 - 2017 she was Artist in Residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, and in Summer 2017 will be artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in California.

Michael Hall is an artist and educator whose work is concerned with finding empathy and complexity in situations that are often polarized and oversimplified. As an artist whose perspective was strongly shaped by his family’s military heritage, he looks to add a more nuanced approach to necessarily critical but discordant conversations. Through painting and participatory works he addresses these dynamics within a larger, multi-faceted cultural context: one of complicated family webs and communities, structural pedagogy, systematized aesthetics and the tenuous space between control and protection.

Hall is a recipient of both a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant and a MFA Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts. His recent Bay Area solo exhibitions include Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Southern Exposure, SF MOMA Artist Gallery and Blankspace Gallery. His work has been featured in group exhibitions nationally and throughout California as well as numerous online and print publications, including New American Painting.

He was born in San Diego, California to military parents and has lived around the world in Japan, Russia, England, and France. Hall received his BFA from the California College of the Arts and his MFA from Mills College. He currently lives and works in Oakland, California. Since 2003, he has taught at Creative Growth Art Center, where he began the first video production class for artists with developmental disabilities. Additionally, he teaches painting at Mills College, UC Berkeley and has participated on the curatorial board at Southern Exposure in San Francisco. In the Fall of 2016 he will join the Faculty of the Department of Art at California State University East Bay as Assistant Professor, Painting and Drawing.

Deborah Oropallo was born in Hackensack New Jersey. She received a B.F.A. from Alfred University and an M.A/M.F.A. from The University of California, Berkeley. Although originally trained in painting, Oropallo’s practice incorporates mixed media including photomontage, computer editing, print technique and paint. Her composite works utilize layered visual sources to produce a dense interplay between time, place, form and content. The resulting works bear traces of the distortions that evolve or remain from digital manipulation and removal. Oropallo’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the de Young Musuem, the Boise Art Museum, Montalvo Gallery, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Biennial, The San Francisco Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery Biennial, the Jewish Museum, and the Richmond Art Center. Oropallo’s work has been featured in two monograph: POMP (2009) published by Gallery 16, and How To, published by the San Jose Museum of Art. Oropallo is also a a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Engelhard Award and a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Stephanie Syjuco (born 1974, in Manila, Philippines), is a San Francisco-based conceptual artist and educator.Her work addresses political concerns regarding issues of labor and economies within a capitalist system. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA 1995) and Stanford University (MFA 2005). She is an Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, di Rosa, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in Visual Arts.