The Asian
Art Museum was once housed in a wing of the de Young Museum building, and for
the last ten years has occupied the site of the former city Main Library. Artist
Chris Fraser searches out spaces of overlay and gaps, drawing attention to the
ways the Asian Art Museum exists in a state between:
between cultures, architectures, histories, and times. These states in between
suggest a sense of transience, and it's in the overlap of the two where the life of the museum
exists.
Using the
camera obscura as a point of departure in his work, Chris Fraser pursues an
experience of light that engages the unseen in everyday phenomena. His work has
been exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Vitra Design Museum,
Disjecta, Highlight Gallery, and Palazzo Bembo as part of the 55th Venice
Biennale. Chris is a recipient of the Jay DeFeo MFA Prize at Mills College and
was recently awarded a Eureka Fellowship by the Fleishhacker Foundation. He has
been artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute and the Djerassi Resident
Artists Program.
Learn more about Chris Fraser in our two-part blog series:
Part 1 - Chris Fraser speaks about his inspiration as an artist
Part 2 - Chris Fraser goes in depth about Renewals/Returns
About the Artists Drawing Club
The Artists
Drawing Club is an interdisciplinary public program series that invites local
contemporary artists to use the museum as a platform, drawing inspiration from
the permanent collection, rotating special exhibitions, the building, and the
neighborhood, and leveraging their artistic practices to realize a new
artist-driven project in which exchange, experience, and interaction are
paramount. The Artists Drawing Club is not about the act of drawing, but
drawing connections between ideas, times, cultures, and the broader world we
occupy.