Opening Reception: Friday, August 25th, 6-9pm
On view: August 25 – September 16, Saturdays and Sundays 12-5pm or weekdays by appointment.
I Am Maneuvering With Difficulty addresses the history of the Fort Mason military site and the semiotics of naval codes. In researching Fort Mason’s history and following conversations with National Park Service historians, Angela Willetts’ explorations of the defunct military base led her to consider how the psychology of fear and defense systems currently operate within her own life. Borrowing military strategies and languages, her work underscores themes of vulnerability and protection through task-based performances, drawings, and handmade, site-specific flags.
The notion of the fortress is central to the exhibition as both a site of self-protection and a signal of internal vulnerability and instability. Forts define the identity of national and military sites; however, for Willetts, they might also occupy the gray area between the institutional and the personal, the domestic, and the maternal. Within her handmade fort—painted in the World War I-era style of dazzle camouflage—Willetts takes on a cavalcade of personas from mother and child to glam rockstar, exploring the role of defense strategies within identity-construction and family relationships. In another video, she assembles an unwieldy escape raft in her living room. As the raft comes together, it grows unmanageably large, inconveniencing everyone and impeding her family’s attempts to sit, eat, and spend time together. A voiceover from a military survival manual dramatizes her solitary attempts at endurance and protection, drawing parallels between approaches to armed conflict and personal experiences of self-preservation.
Other works soften and repurpose military languages as the framework for poetry. Utilizing phrases found in the International Code of Signals—an alphanumeric maritime directory for flag semaphore—Willetts wrote short poems on the frustration of communicating one’s needs and emotions within a romantic relationship. These poems, in the Dada tradition of borrowed language, are both humorous and sly, yet trapped in the utilitarianism of ship captains’ signals for aid. I am caught in thick fog and Where shall I anchor? become personal articulations of need, proclamations for distressing times. The phrases are translated to the abstract geometries of semaphore flags, displayed in the gallery as well as outside it, along flagpoles and lampposts on the Fort Mason campus. The material of the flags, sewn from used clothes into patchwork composites, creates a domestic conduit of militancy. The clothes act as both individual boundary and armor surrounding the body. Sewn together as flags, they become repositories of collective identity, an archive of skins shed, and an amalgam of communal defenses abandoned.
To accompany the exhibition, the maritime poems are collected alongside overlaid images of the flags to which they refer in a new publication from National Monument Press: Relationships. Language is perhaps its own fortress, as is particularly true for the direct and unambiguous phrases of international maritime signals. Borrowed here, they are subverted to speak about vulnerability and the search for love. Painted in layers over one another in simultaneous and chaotic communication rather than in series, they allow new images and meanings to emerge from the confusion of information.
Embark Gallery is the brick-and-mortar space for the 501(c)-3 nonprofit Embark Arts Inc. We offers exhibition opportunities to current and recently graduated MFA students in the San Francisco Bay Area. We provide a space for an engaged community of artists, curators and scholars, and we aim to expand the audience for up and coming contemporary art. Embark’s programming represents the diversity of the talented artists studying at eight local art institutions: San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Mills College, San Francisco State University, UC Davis, San Jose State University, and Stanford. The juried exhibitions are held at our gallery in San Francisco at the historic Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.
