Caitlin Petersen
FINDER'S KEEPERS
16 April 2017

For the inaugural iteration of R/SF EN PLEIN AIR, we are proud to feature a site-specific installation and performance by San Francisco-based mixed media artist Caitlin Petersen. From 1-4pm on Sunday, April 16, we invite you to join us for an Easter-egg-hunt-style tour of approximately 50 sculptures interspersed throughout Golden Gate Park. Participants will have the option of picking up or downloading maps to follow a self-guided tour, or to join the 1pm artist-led walkabout, co-shepherded by performance artist Yvette Dibos. In a safari-style (and self-dubbed “performedy”) excursion, the duo will lead audience members through historical sites and park landmarks from the infamous buffalo paddock to the Dutch windmill to the Golden Gate Polo Field, identifying scattered artworks along the way which guests are explicitly invited to add to, deface, or collect.

Caitlin Petersen is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice investigates opposites and in-betweens. Fabricating sculptures from the colorful detritus she encounters daily, Petersen breathes new life into discarded materials to speak to notions of reuse and eco-sustainability. Firmly aware of our anthropocentric state of being, Petersen fuses recognizable waste with found natural objects (frisbee discs, pine cones, plastic, bark) to craft eccentric, endearing objects that speak to prior use and stake claim to new futures—effectively returning the materials to their natural habitat and releasing them back into the wild. Embodying mostly spherical forms that echo both the cellular and solar, the works take on the structure and function of plastiglomerates, each fused with Gorilla Glue like emblems of our current epoch. 

Entitled “Finders Keepers,” the exhibition specifically engages Golden Gate Park as a recreational site with myriad, wide-ranging points of interest. Refashioning the format of a scavenger hunt, the show’s promenade style viewing incorporates physical meandering, perhaps in line with a Situationist notion of psychogeography, to automatically engage participants with their environment and catalyze a reconsideration of our relationship therein. As the eye becomes trained to seek the refuse-turned-art objects, Petersen sends us each home with a reenergized perspective, and a new way of viewing the world.

Schedule:
12:00 hrs - 13:00 hrs Meet at Pittsburgh Pub (4207 Judah St at 47th Ave)
13:00 hrs Artist-Led Tour leaves Pittsburgh Pub
(25th Fulton end spot - drops off at bus stop (MUNI 5, 28, 29) 
* Visitors are also welcome to join at any point during the tour, text
* Please see attached map for specific meeting points and hotspots
* Follow our instagram story along the way @rsfprojects
* Sunday’s finest attire suggested with suitable all-terrain walking shoes!

R/SF EN PLEIN AIR is the roving curatorial platform of R/SF projects, staging exhibitions throughout San Francisco’s many public parks and urban spaces. An effort to exit the white cube as well as engage new publics, each exhibition features the work of one or multiple emerging artists to position artwork in an accessible and often interactive manner. The series pays homage to the city’s vibrant public life and intentionally pairs its artistic collaborators with sites that resonate with their particular practice. In the long trajectory of plein air painting, the series re-imagines interaction between art object and landscape, and embraces open-ended outcomes.