Completed June 2006.

Thank you to all the patrons who purchased cans of art gallery and made EnCanment such a success! May we remind you that, in addition to making lovely gifts, canned cultural space is an important addition to that earthquake/survival kit you've been meaning to pull together.

BUY a can of art gallery! Click here!

EnCanment was a performance installation included in the "Between the Walls" exhibition at San Francisco's venerable Southern Exposure art gallery. Curated by Emily Sevier, "Between the Walls" was the final show in 2006 before the gallery closed for seismic retrofitting.

For the exhibition, artists were encouraged to consider ideas of migration, transition, improvisation and community.

Over the course of its 32-year tenure, Southern Exposure has hosted hundreds of artist and community gatherings. The physical space of the SoEx gallery community is an accretion of cultural value and sedimentation of SoEx’s mission to bring art to diverse audiences.

In response to the concept of the exhibition, and in celebration of Southern Exposure’s rich history in this space, Rebar created EnCanment - a temporary canning operation that harvested, processed and canned the gallery itself. Rebar systematically mapped and cored sections of the gallery wall and, utilizing the latest in industrial assembly-line technology, canned the cores in metal cans on-site during the opening and closing night events. Cans were then labeled and sold to support SoEx and Rebar.

EnCanment is situated in the historical context of the gallery, which occupies a former industrial site that once housed the American Can Company. The earliest incarnation of SoEx called itself the “American Can Collective.”

By creating processed, canned gallery space and distributing that space to the SoEx community, Rebar hopes to capture and sustain both the physical manifestation and the spirit of the gallery while SoEx undergoes a radical transformation.

And, to track the distribution of the cans of gallery across the globe, we are collecting geographical information about can purchasers. This information will be used to create a geographical dispersion map of the gallery walls around the world.

Gallery Dispersion Map coming soon!

Rebar wishes to thank Emily Sevier, Courtney Fink, Kristen Evangelista, Aimee Le Duc and all the artists and volunteers at SoEx for their patience and good humor as we harvested and commodified their gallery for profit. Rebar wishes to offer a special thanks to the generous and inspiring Michael Arcega for his help during the install and for the extraordinary work he puts in the world.

Contact Rebar:

holler [at] rebargroup [dot] org

photos

Video from KQED's
SPARK TV show

Can Label

EnCanment was created by Rebar, who in this instance was:

Matthew Passmore
John Bela
Sasha Wizansky
Andrea Scher
Blaine Merker
Brady Moss
Gregory Kellett
Denise Sauerteig
Camella Bontaites
Jeremy Cantor
Grant Ballard
Viola Toniolo
Tim Hyde