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Artist Statement:
Over the past 4 years I have
gathered confiscated items
from security checkpoints at
San Francisco International
Airport, in order to express
visually how many of our
everyday routines have been
disrupted since 9/11.
The objects lend themselves to
interpretations that resonate
with the viewer's own personal
experience. ...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
2007 "Predilections"
Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New
York
Feb. 10 - March 15
Reception: Saturday Feb.24
4-6pm
www.nancyhoffmangallery.com
...
Further Information
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Collections:
Roselyne Swig, San Francisco,
CA
Rene di Rosa, Napa, CA
Joachim and Nancy Bechtle, San
Francisco, CA
Suzanne Bass, New York, NY...
Further Information
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Reviews for Michele Pred:
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"Found objects have a rich history as ingredients of modern art, stemming from the early collages of Picasso and Braque. East Bay artist Michele Pred adds a new category to the vast catalog of found art materials: the confiscated object."
-Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle
September 7, 2002
At the center of Pred's show in a corner ground-floor retail space of the Fifth & Mission parking garage sits a glimmering haystack of items taken by security personnel from departing passengers at San Francisco International Airport. Scissors of all sizes, from pinking shears to cuticle clippers, predominate. Other items include corkscrews, knives, knitting needles, squirt guns, razor blades, blender blades and sticks of incense. Pred fished dozens of tiny scissors out of the heap to make a wall array as bright and harmless-looking as a butterfly collection.
Like iron filings in a magnet's field, these amassed items align in the mind to point to a fateful date: Sept. 11. The confiscated objects have become props in an official charade of public reassurance that frequently verges on civil harassment. Simply by massing enough expropriated stuff, Pred sparks reflection on the post-Sept. 11 climate of belief as to what security means and whether its meaning has changed, who is a threat and who says so.
Pred wisely declares no politics in her show, knowing that something in her mass of confiscated goods will prick every viewer with unhappy recollections of post-Sept. 11 airport encounters. Anyone who puts together recent exposes of colossal corporate swindles with their own experience of airport aggravation will wonder who needs protection from whom. On one wall of Pred's exhibition is a U.S. flag composed of confiscated red, white and blue plastic cigarette lighters. The piece hovers halfway between Jasper Johns' proto-pop icon and the countless makeshift flags in American folk art. But it also rediscovers, behind a "homeland security" smoke screen, more mundane concerns about the tobacco industry as a public safety threat.
Many viewers of Pred's show -- which occupies a space donated by the city's Downtown Parking Corp. -- will not guess that she began creating powerful assemblages of aircraft wreckage well before Sept. 11, nor appreciate the power her untitled stack of confiscations gains from the context of late 20th century art.
European artists such as Arman, Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) and Michelangelo Pistoletto offered up piles of found stuff as sufficient sculpture, inspiring younger people such as Robert Morris, Tony Cragg and Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1958-1996) to similar exercises. Though the implications and emotional tone varied with differences in material and setting, accumulation of material as a sculptor's gesture has proved a startlingly flexible means of making art illuminate a historical moment. Pred's confiscation piece instantly and firmly positions itself in that stream.
Pred's airplane wreckage pieces -- one of which fills a street-side show window -- are more ambiguous than the commemorative title of the show, "In Memory," suggests. They read as obdurate symbols of psychic wounds, not merely as protests against danger or totems of heroism. Pred, 36, worked as a limo driver before and after Sept. 11, until back problems grounded her. Countless trips to the airport and complaints from her passengers about their treatment by security personnel set her thinking about the growing mountain of confiscated stuff. Relentless persuasion led airport authorities to grant her request for the now-ownerless material.
A few earlier assemblage pieces, on hand to flesh out the exhibition, show that Pred's work leaped to another level when she began thinking about the fate of the confiscated object.
She walks a treacherous line between reflection and exploitation in the work on view, reminding us of how real world events can restore risk to what might otherwise be merely esoteric art.
BROADCASTS
September 2002
CNN Headline News
CBS 9.11 Documentary
KRON Evening News
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