Furniture faculty member Barbara Holmes spent most of February installing a tour de force exhibition in an impressive new space in one of San Francisco's more down-and-out neighborhoods. Located at 1045 Mission Street between 6th and 7th Streets, it will be on view through Sunday, May 27, 2012. Since it's viewable only through the front windows, visitors are welcome to come take a look 24 hours a day. At night the piece is theatrically lit with interior spotlights.

Read the press release

1045 Mission Street is a 100-foot-long window-front space on the ground floor of SOMA Residencies. In 2011, the owners invited Recology's artist in residence (AIR) program to utilize it for off-site exhibits. Holmes is one of the first artists to install there, and she leaped on the opportunity to conceive her most ambitious piece to date -- one that would specifically take advantage of the entire available space and the nighttime illumination possibilities. The opportunity to create something so abstract, almost alive, on this big of a scale, was deeply interesting.

Also interesting were her interactions with people who live in the neighborhood and passed by while she was installing. The door was closed, but that didn't stop people from tapping on the window pretty much daily, wanting to ask about what she was doing and, occasionally, relate their life story. "It's a pretty tough neighborhood. Sometimes the interactions were funny, sometimes sad. A lot of the people who were passing by, seeing the piece, were not people who would ordinarily go to art galleries, so it was wonderful to reach them with an artwork."

Holmes began experimenting with lath and plaster sculpture during her residency at the San Francisco dump in 2008. These materials are always available in the waste stream (from the demolition of walls in older homes), and in her capable hands they transformed into meticulously geometric accumulations, like crystal structures growing in sugar water. See photos.

"As an artist I enjoy transforming and recontexualizing materials," she says, "reworking the ubiquitous or banal into something unfamiliar and unique. Using waste material that is often untidy and muddled in appearance and redeeming it into a carefully crafted object is a pleasurable part of my process. Converting what has been cast off into something of value and beauty is an act of optimism."

Holmes documented the installation with time-lapse photography, and will do the same at the end of May when it's time for the demolition. We'll amend this story with the video when it is available!