Yerba Buena Complex Phase I

Detail View of Main Gallery and Lobby Installation
Bay Area Now 5 / Inside-Out, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA 2008

Left: main gallery installation, Yerba Buena Complex: Deep Gradient/YBCA I, colored theater film, (3-channel video and drawings out of view to the right).

Right: lobby installation, Yerba Buena Complex: Deep Gradient/YBCA II, colored theater film, single-channel video, Yerba Buena Complex: Facies I-III, 45:00, 1991-2008

The symbolism of transparent green, as in the green glass of Deep Gradient/Suspect Terrain.., refers to the deep-sea depositional environment, of sediment, and specifically to the historic and contemporary depositional environments of the site's Franciscan Complex and related sediments contained within the ship. The green also refers to the transport and displacement of these sediments, both in time and distance, from previous landscapes as well as accretionary processes. These concepts are extended and reconfigured in Yerba Buena Complex Phase I by application of transparent green film to the architecture of Yerba Beuna Center for the Arts, symbolically including that structure (and potentially all of Yerba Buena Gardens) as Anthropocene Epoch strata/intrusions to the site's geologic construct and history.

In conjunction with the green depositional symbolism, the video documentation also included in this installation, with images of raw materiality, extraction and deposition reinforces the analog of humanity as an Anthropocene agent of denudation and formation, arguably indistinct from that of nature. Three-channel and single-channel video, design drawings and conceptual studies are part of this installation - the lobby single-channel video is visible in the top right image of this page. Expanding on these themes and included in the drawing, Yerba Buena Complex - Facies Study (Transport/Erosion/Deposition/Consolidation/Chronologic Analogs), 2008, is a proposal for Yerba Buena Complex Phase II, an expression of research and visualization of the allochthonous geologic origin of the aluminum cladding of the Center for the Arts, and by extension all of Yerba Buena Gardens.

Yerba Buena Complex Overview; Drawings/Video of Yerba Buena Complex Phase I; Yerba Buena Complex Phase II; Yerba Buena Complex - Preliminary Studies