DESCRIPTION
Bone Black is a group exhibition featuring top San Francisco Bay Area artists with works of art in various media that explore the intersection between logic, geometry and instinct, and the direct engagement of the ineffable. San Francisco’s Margaret Jenkins Dance Company will perform excerpts from their current season throughout the evening.

Bone Black features works of art in various media that explore the intersection between logic, geometry and instinct, and the direct engagement of the ineffable. Bone Black is a winter exhibition; the overarching theme is directly related to this season: long nights, bare branches viewed in thin light, things stripped to their elements.

The title of the exhibition, Bone Black, takes its name from a pigment produced over 30,000 years ago in the Franco-Cantabrian region which was used in Paleolithic cave paintings such as at Lascaux. This pigment has been used by artists in a lineage that encompasses the history of art in the Western tradition: artists such as Raphael, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet and Richard Serra have all used bone black in their works of art. Rich in contradictory meanings and associations, black is alternately associated with death, the clergy, revolutionaries and the subversive. And yet, for some artists, black is the ultimate neutral element, a “non-color” stripped of meaning to become a vehicle to “hold space.” Bone black in this context becomes what is unspoken, and what is understood intuitively.

The exhibition looks back to prehistory to explore this Paleolithic mind; a pre-Aristotelian viewpoint in which things are experienced for the first time; a synthesis of the natural world and the esoteric; the transcendent moment in the totality of the eclipse; where dance communicates oral histories and a communion with the divine.