A GESTURE OF REMEMBRANCE (2022) is a multi-room installation that acknowledges the house at 500 Capp Street before it was David Ireland’s house and before it was in the hands of the 500 Capp Street Foundation as a means of honoring the forgotten, under-looked, and surviving aspects of Bay Area history.
The work positions a hidden bit of original wallpaper that survived Ireland’s iconic reductive wall treatment— found within a built-in sink countertop cabinet in Ireland’s bedroom— as being an under-recognized source of his artistic oeuvre. Given that the wet wallpaper removal process was an accidental precursor to Ireland’s well-known “patties,” “dumballs,” “smartballs,” and “torpedoes,” the wallpaper he took down could be seen as a source not unlike the artist’s conceptual and material use of excavated dirt from under the house.
A GESTURE OF REMEMBRANCE reinterprets what the wall paper in the home might have looked like based on what was left behind, reimagines what we can see as a repeating pattern, reintegrates the wallpaper back into the home in the most contemporarily remodeled section of the house in a gesture of reconnecting old and new, and also highlights two adjacent locations— the original wallpaper in the bedroom, and the signatures of the wallpaper artisans marked directly onto bare plaster in the office study in 1904.
This work was developed during a year-long research residency and for the solo exhibition AS ABOVE SO BELOW at the 500 Capp Street Foundation in San Francisco’s Mission District. The wallpaper is a four-color linoleum block print in oil-based ink on sketch paper done with Marcius Noceda and Lindsay Rio, hand-carved and hand-printed on-site in the upper two parlor rooms. The wallpaper was wheat pasted by Drew Grasso and additional installation help was provided by Lindsay Rio, Owen Takabayashi, Victor Saucedo, Ava Koohbor, and Justin Nagle. Lighting support by Rico Duenas.
Photographs courtesy of Sherwin Rio.