Sadie Barnette, Untitled (Sound System), 2018. Metal flake on found objects. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery. Photo courtesy Charlie James Gallery.‍

Come join Sadie Barnette in conversation with Olivia Young as they rethink the forgotten and disremembered, and unveil hidden layers of meaning and significance across the PHONE HOME exhibition.

The glint surfacing the walls of Sadie Barnette's PHONE HOME reaches beyond the familiar, flickering towards the not-yet-emergent affinities of kinship-making. Her work not only gestures to the imaginative and unknown, it also teaches us how to build from what we forgot to remember.

The title, "PHONE HOME," evokes a spectrum of communications, from outer space to the familial, across galaxies or borders. The site-specific installations on the first-floor columns offer an interactive listening station and library. Part self-portrait and part manifesto, the sparkling library tethers disparate genres and knowledge systems into a constellation of cultural transmissions and collective memory. The domestic becomes monumental in Barnette's gestures of adornment.

This exhibition is curated by Emily Kuhlmann, Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs and Soleil Summer, Exhibitions Associate.

Whether in the form of drawing, photography or large-scale installation, Sadie Barnette’s work relishes in the abstraction of city space and the transcendence of the mundane to the imaginative. Born and raised in Oakland, California, she earned her BFA from CalArts and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally and is in the permanent collections of museums such as LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, the California African American Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem (where she was also Artist-in-Residence), Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim.

She is the recipient of Art Matters and Artadia awards and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, and Vogue. She lives in Oakland, CA and is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.

‍Oliva K. Young is a PhD candidate in the department of African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Her work examines distortion as a material and methodological aesthetic of black feminist art that calls attention to the contingent and non-visual ways one “sees” blackness and, by extension, black womxn’s sentience and subjectivity. Her writing appears in Women & Performance as well as exhibition catalogues for The New Museum, Gallery 44, The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Antenna Gallery.

‍This program includes a wine reception