Recology Artist in Residence Exhibitions: Work by David Bayus, Malcolm Kenter/Rachel Marino, and student artist Omar Howaida El-Sabrout.

David Bayus’s work is a cross-disciplinary practice centered around experimental film-making with a focus on the increasingly convergent relationships between spirituality, technology, and crisis. Thank You, Saint Anthony is a new video and sculpture installation inspired by the rhyming Catholic prayer: “Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and needs to be found!” Often spoken by Bayus’s grandmother when looking for something, the incantation acts as the conceptual foundation for his residency at Recology.

In his video installation, Bayus creates a theatrical series of beach-side vignettes where life emerges anew from a primordial ocean of synthetic fibers, micro plastics, and lost objects. As evolving biomass encroaches the coastline, a newly formed sentience–sitting in the middle of a new eden–has the privilege to be the first of its kind to get the blues.

As in the artist’s previous exhibitions, the forms created in his virtual environments ultimately make their way into the real world and the viewer is presented with Bayus’s newest sculptural work. Focusing on one single object sourced from the San Francisco waste stream, Bayus explores the anthropomorphic distinctions between a “found” and a “saved” object, between serendipity and salvation, and between evolution and intelligent design.

Written by Danielle Grant.

In their collaborative exhibition, City Limit, Malcolm Kenter and Rachel Marino present an immersive exhibition inspired by the infrastructure and detritus of the city and invite us to reexamine our everyday surroundings by combining pieces in a playful sculptural environment rendered slightly askew. Familiar elements like mundane trash, rain gutters and duct work, fire hydrants, sidewalk curbs, and discarded food are combined in unexpected ways–giant fruit tumble from a fountain structure and visitors are invited to activate golf balls through a Rube Goldberg device mounted to a wall. Segments of stucco wall have been painted in muted pop colors that reference the color palette of the surrounding Little Hollywood, Visitacion Valley, and Daly City neighborhoods. Artificial turf has been cut into patterns, some reminiscent of the paver designs embedded in nearby driveways.

Drawing equal inspiration from their explorations of the Public Reuse and Recycling Area at Recology and careful observations on their routine commute to the studio, Kenter and Marino call attention to the details at the margins: the trash that has been tossed aside, functional home architecture, and street corner environments. There’s a joy to the heightened remix of elements in the exhibition, celebrating the parts of ordinary life that are too often viewed as disposable or beneath consideration.

Malcolm Kenter and Rachel Marino combine their efforts to create interactive and highly detailed sculptural environments. Marino often gathers inspiration from the easily discarded condiments of American cuisine replicating them on a fantastically large scale. Kenter’s work highlights the oft overlooked aspects of the pre-21st century architectural landscape. Through these different concepts, both artists have developed an intimate connection to the ideas of excess and how people perceive surplus in America. They have exhibited together at the Spring/Break Art Fair in New York and Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco.

Written by Weston Teruya.

Creating tamy’ mud-bricks from compost and recovered clay, Stanford graduate Omar Howaida El-Sabrout constructs large sculptural forms reflecting cultural knowledge and a familial agricultural lineage passed down through oral storytelling across continents and generations, from Egypt to San Francisco, from grandfather and granduncle to El-Sabrout. The process of adapting these building techniques, similar to adobe brick construction, to the specific context of materials found at Recology offers a lens on how tradition and spiritual practice can be sustained and transformed in diaspora–and to some degree, what might be lost as elders pass on.

At the center of in heaven // she won’t have pain // she won’t have anything is a large tamy’ brick structure that anchors the exhibition. The cave-like piece references both a mihrab–the wall niche in a mosque which faces Mecca (and from San Francisco, the approximate direction of Egypt and El-Sabrout’s family)–and Egyptian dovecotes–earthen towers with openings and embedded sticks that house hundreds of pigeons, a ubiquitous architectural feature in some regions of the country. For El-Sabrout, the structure proposes a kind of sanctuary for immigrants and those far from home, a protected space that looks toward distant family, built using the knowledge inherited from those relationships.

The other two pieces in the exhibition, a painting that El-Sabrout created on the surface of a found canvas and a coffin constructed from tamy’ bricks, acknowledge the passage of life, the ephemerality of these artistic works, and the emergence of something new from what came before. The painting depicts a baby-figure with a skull head, sitting next to a sand castle about to be washed away by a large wave. Bits of the original, discarded painting found by El-Sabrout peek out at the edges of the image. The coffin form, filled with fragments of broken glass and pottery, suggests a sense of loss, but frames it in this earthen vessel, made of fecund compost and soil. In an exhibition inspired by knowledge passed down from elders, the pieces simultaneously mourn the inability to capture all of the wisdom held by previous generations, while celebrating the possibilities for the future. The installation also includes chairs strategically arranged in the gallery which the artist offers with the hope that visitors sit, contemplate the work, and possibly share their own stories of what they have learned from previous generations.

Omar Howaida El-Sabrout is an artist, writer, and musician who graduated from Stanford University in June with a degree in Comparative Literature. They play with dirt & fermentation to make work about memory, identity, cultural heritage, community, brownness, queerness, and the like. This is Omar’s premiere exhibition outside of school.

Written by Weston Teruya.