Screening: Three on a Match, 1994 (Leslie Singer video footage of Kevin Killian play)
Thursday, July 17pm 2008 @ 6pm
SF Camerawork, 657 Mission Street, San Francisco

Ratio 3 is pleased to present Kiki: The Proof Is In the Pudding, a retrospective look at Kiki, a short-lived but influential San Francisco gallery of the 1990s, on view from June 27 through August 2, 2008.

The late Rick Jacobsen (1961-1997), Kiki’s founder and director, turned his AIDS diagnosis into a second chance at life and opened a tiny space on 14th Street in San Francisco’s Mission District in the summer of 1993. Eighteen months later, declining health forced him to close the gallery, but in the meantime Kiki presented an amazing run of provocative, innovative shows. As an alternative to traditional San Francisco commercial galleries, Kiki was never a moneymaker, but Jacobsen curated exhibitions with audacious themes, discovered new artists, threw open the gallery to performance and conceptual work, and became a key player in the nascent Mission School movement, giving it a homocore dimension and a political edge born of his previous work with ACT UP and Queer Nation.

For Ratio 3, writer Kevin Killian and artist Colter Jacobsen (no relation to Rick!) have gathered many of the key artists and artworks originally shown at Kiki. It’s a huge range of work, from Catherine Opie’s portraits of sexual trangressives to Keith Mayerson’s watercolors of “Pinocchio the Big Fag,” from Jerome Caja’s punky cartoons using dime store makeup instead of crayon, to the paint-by-numbers dreamworld of D-L Alvarez and the rough street scenes of Chris Johanson. Curators Jacobsen and Killian will each be producing a zine for this show, and there will be a video evening held at SF Camerawork to highlight some of the important performance work Kiki showcased.

The artists include D-L Alvarez, Lutz Bacher, Nayland Blake, Jerome Caja, Kota Ezawa, Vincent Fecteau, Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Rick Jacobsen, Chris Johanson, Keith Mayerson, Karla Milosevich, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Rex Ray, Brett Reichman, Michelle Rollman, Wayne Smith, and Jim Winters.