A show just opened at USF's Thacher Gallery where architects and artists, Catherine Chang, Elaine Buckholtz, Pedro Lange Churion, Paul Madonna and Moshe Quinn, examine the narrow walls of air between Victorian buildings north of San Francisco's Panhandle. In a town where the real estate cost/sf. is so high, it's about time these negative spaces are honored and farmed for some extra meaning. Exhibit closes April 25th.
As a type of social/residential boundary, this arm's-length distance challenges one's sense of privacy while indulging curiosity about the neighbors. If I forgot to draw the curtains at bedtime in my North Beach flat, the donna vecchia next door would be watching me awake the next morn. A friend who grew up in the Mission told me that when she dared to peek once, a man in a meeting across the chasm reached out his window and gave her a candy bar. Surely all manner of behavioral trespassing has taken place in these slots; the USF show attends to geometry, space and light.
As a type of social/residential boundary, this arm's-length distance challenges one's sense of privacy while indulging curiosity about the neighbors. If I forgot to draw the curtains at bedtime in my North Beach flat, the donna vecchia next door would be watching me awake the next morn. A friend who grew up in the Mission told me that when she dared to peek once, a man in a meeting across the chasm reached out his window and gave her a candy bar. Surely all manner of behavioral trespassing has taken place in these slots; the USF show attends to geometry, space and light.
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