Every student at San Francisco State University knows about the myth of Al the alligator, the school mascot and the 1976 student protests to free him from captivity.
At least that’s what Liz Hernández, SFSU’s artist-in-residence, dares to imagine through her new exhibition, “Objects of Inquiry: The Office for the Study of the Ordinary,” now on display in SFSU’s Fine Arts Building. Hernández’s exhibition is the culmination of the project that is “The Office for the Study of the Ordinary,” a hypothetical department at SFSU which mimics and pokes at the bureaucracy inherent to universities and their colleges.
The project consisted of class collaborations and individual studies which sought to examine the mundane and ordinary through radical and fictional lenses. The undertaking is in line with Hernández’s work which often blends the fictional with the real, the large with the small.
“In my art practice, I like mixing things that shouldn’t go together,” said Hernández. “Bureaucracy or scientific research are being used to investigate feelings, daily experiences, things that have a lot of meaning and knowledge and substance, but that we don’t pay attention to or we might just disregard as unimportant.
The exhibition is Hernández’s, but it is also a collaborative effort between tens of students who found something that spoke to them in what Hernández wanted to explore. Through this project, Hernández encouraged students to explore and create with total freedom, and members of the project created ID cards with whimsical titles for themselves.
Beyond that, students were encouraged to make statues and portraits from scratch, to rearrange decades-old facility furniture and adorn it with their own creations and to just freely express themselves in any way through a lens of their own. Unbound artistry defines the project and its space.
The scale of the project goes beyond what was expected when the Fine Arts Gallery Director, Sharon Bliss, and the gallery’s curator, Kevin B. Chen, brought Hernández on as SFSU’s artist-in-residence.
“We were most taken with how out-of-left-field her proposed project was,” said Chen. “It was completely silly and fun and, in kind of radical in terms, able to decentralize the authoritative naming powers of what people consider significant and important.”
Hernández is SFSU’s first artist-in-residence and is here through grants from The Harker Fund of the San Francisco Foundation, which gives universities the funds to provide an opportunity for artists at the campus. Hernández was chosen after a long search.
“We did a call for nominations and through that process we ended up with three finalists. Liz won,” said Bliss. “She thinks about what is given value and held onto for decades or centuries, so this is the idea that you subvert that and can create your own versions of what’s important.”
Pieces featured in the exhibition range from smaller drawings to imaginative large-scale portraiture and an unconventional papier-mâché sculpture of Al, the fictional alligator. Hernández’s vision spoke to many students at SFSU who found a calling in the project including Ashley Kim, a graduate of SFSU’s Studio Art program.
“I went to her older exhibition on a field trip, and she did this amazing piece by herself and took up the whole entire space,” said Kim. “So when she came into the classroom, I remembered her and she brought this project. I thought, ‘this is so peaceful.’”
“Objects of Inquiry: The Office for the Study of the Ordinary” is on display at the Fine Arts Gallery now through April 5.
