CUBE SPACE
Located on the ground floor of the Center Street Garage at 2010 Addison Street near Milvia Street in the heart of the arts district in Downtown Berkeley, Cube Space features exhibitions of works by Bay Area emerging and mid-career artists working in video, multi-media, and sculpture to create installations which are viewable at all hours, every day of the week.
Current Exhibition
Trans Boxing: Remote Pictures, by Nolan Hanson and Ada Jane McNulty
August 21 – December 19, 2021
Photo by Kija Lucas.
For their exhibition in the Cube Space Gallery, artists Nolan Hanson and Ada Jane McNulty invite the public to view archival materials from the past year of Trans Boxing. The multimedia installation includes a portrait series, screenshots from virtual classes, and other visual material produced by participants, alongside sculptural elements which evoke the experiential and aesthetic qualities of a boxing gym.
Trans Boxing is an ongoing co-authored art project in the form of a boxing club that centers trans and gender variant people. The project shifts in response to context and conditions and continuously reimagines possibilities for social engagement. Trans Boxing was founded in 2017 by Nolan Hanson and is housed in New York City. Ada Jane McNulty is an artist living in New York City. She spends her time in photography, boxing, skateboarding, and anti-capitalist organizing.
Curated by Leila Weefur.
Past Exhibitions
Elliptic, by J. Rivera Pansa
March 6 – July 4, 2021
Photo by Kija Lucas.
Elliptic is an installation of collective sculptures and an original accompanying text exploring self-determinative networks of kinship and collective being-ness. The work incorporates the “grid” as a formal reflection on humanistic systems in regards to seriality and contemporary capital structures. Through simplicity, these forms imagine a symbolic quietude while imagining the complexities of embodied variance.
J Rivera Pansa works in occupied Chochenyo Ohlone Land.
Currently, Rivera Pansa incorporates the "grid" as an expansive field tethering association involving connectivity and physical structural systems.
This exhibition was organized by independent curator Leila Weefur.
touch and go, by Dionne Lee
October 6, 2020 – January 31, 2021
Photo by Kija Lucas.
touch and go is an installation curated by Leila Weefur of large scale mixed media collages and video works that source, reenact, and re-photograph images from wilderness survival books, exploring the relationship between rescue, danger, and the necessity of touch. Lee's images are a metaphorical guide, assembling a narrative of survival skills that manifest amid environmental chaos and the historical systems of oppression that determine who survives.
Dionne Lee uses photography, collage, and video to investigate ideas of power and race in relation to the American landscape.
OPPOSITE DAY, by Sofie Ramos
December 14, 2019 – August 16, 2020
Photo by Dianne Jones.
Sofie Ramos creates maximalist sculptural installations of vibrantly painted and precariously placed household objects combined with colorful textured materials that imagine and bring to life other worlds inside, alongside, and underneath our own. With her installation OPPOSITE DAY in the Cube Space, the artist flips her recent obsession with large piles of objects on its head, symbolically defying oppressive forces that hold us down (in this case, gravity). Ramos's use of bold color and playful shapes transforms the colossal mass into a vivid three dimensional painting where everyday objects animate a fantastical cartoonish scene.
Ramos was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and received her BA in Visual Art from Brown University and her MFA in Art Practice from University of California, Berkeley. She is currently based in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
A Pallet of Blackberry and Feverfew, by Richard-Jonathan Nelson
October 12 – December 7, 2019
Photo by Marie-Luise Klotz.
A Pallet of Blackberry and Feverfew, by Richard-Jonathan Nelson, was a site-specific installation created for the Cube Space organized by independent curator Demetri Broxton. A Pallet of Blackberry and Feverfew is a hoodoo prescription for protection that Nelson has translated into a video textile installation which transforms the Cube Space into a place to ruminate on how Queer people of the Black Diaspora can nurture themselves and their identity while navigating the cacophony of modern life. For this installation Nelson blends the craft of quilting and digital art to create an alternative world where the Black body is removed from the persistent historic depictions of it as servile and without agency. Nelson's work references both African American low country herbalism and cybernetic Afrofuturism as a means to expand our concept of who and what Black people can be culturally.
Richard-Jonathan Nelson is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses textiles, video, and digital manipulation to create alternative worlds of speculative identity. Born in Savannah, Georgia in 1987 and working in Oakland, CA, Nelson received his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017.
San Jose and Juri, by Amy M. Ho
August 31 – October 5, 2019
Photo by Marie-Luise Klotz.
San Jose and Juri, by Amy M. Ho, was a site-specific installation created for the Cube Space (curated by Demetri Broxton), which was part of a recent series of artwork by Amy M. Ho that draws from local architecture. Over the last few years, the Bay Area has experienced an influx of wealth that has helped drive real estate prices up and as a result, buildings are being renovated, or torn down and replaced by new development. Creating work in response to the changing urban landscape, the artist aims to preserve her memories of the local architecture via large-scale installations that explore how we inhabit our world both psychologically and physically. Space is the most immediate medium through which we understand the world yet we often take it for granted. Amy M. Ho's artwork explores the role that space and architecture play in our experiences and their impact on our individual identities.
Sea Beds and Signals by Dimitra Skandali
June 8 – August 10, 2019
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Photo by Marie-Luise Klotz.
Sea Beds and Signals, by artist Dimitra Skandali, was a site-specific installation created for the Cube Space organized by independent curator Demetri Broxton. Using materials such as seagrass and seaweed from the Pacific Ocean and found fishing net from the coasts of Bengal, Skandali's installation is composed of elements that allude to oceanic environments, pollution and a growing environmental risk.
Dimitra Skandali grew up on Paros, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea and was educated in Greece and the Netherlands before moving to California and earning her MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2013. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and her works have been exhibited throughout the Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, and Houston, as well as in the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Portugal, the Philippines, and Greece. She lives and works in the United States and Paros Island, Greece.