Heart shaped box

Pub date June 25, 2008
SectionArts & CultureSectionVisual Art

"Let’s pretend we own the world today," Kathleen Hanna sings midway through the uncharacteristic Bikini Kill ballad "For Tammy Rae." In her new solo show "An Archive of Feelings," the woman Hanna was singing for, Tammy Rae Carland, breaks down and reframes some of what she owns from a queer, feminist perspective that upsets emotional and financial conceits. Carland can wittily point out the beauty of mold and frame it in gold, but her show’s largest C-prints are perhaps the most powerful. My Inheritance presents 21 objects that belonged to her late mother. The widely varying forms of worth that might be ascribed to bingo memorabilia and domestic objects take on a tough, acidic irony here — through the piece’s title, and through a presentation that resembles and critiques the kind of white-page auction presentation found in Sotheby’s catalogs. One Love Leads to Another similarly presents the tape culture (via cassettes such as Let’s Rock from the 1980s that kick-started K Records in Carland’s onetime home of Olympia, Wash. Like Carland’s mother’s keepsakes, these punk feminist objects have a colorful Yard Birds’ aesthetic specific to Washington state, but their countless communal and creative connections showcase the power of sisterhood beyond bloodline.

AN ARCHIVE OF FEELINGS

Through July 27

Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m., free.

Silverman Gallery

804 Sutter, SF