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Claire Fontaine’s Newsfloor (San Francisco Chronicle) (2024-2025), brings the world into the exhibition space, encapsulating recent events from late September to the day before the exhibition’s opening, spanning federal, state, and local elections and global news. Acting as both a stage and a backdrop for the other works to unfold, Newsfloor examines the organization and dissemination of information: what stories are told, how they are framed, and which are neglected. At the same time, it reflects on the accelerating speed of information consumption, as the shift from traditional newsprint to the digital sphere renders printed media increasingly obsolete. This interplay between the slower, deliberate rhythm of print, and the instantaneous nature of digital news, distorts our sense of time and how we absorb and process information.

In Dissonant (2010), Manon de Boer films dancer Cynthia Loemij as she performs a 10-minute response to Eugène Ysaÿe’s 3 Sonatas for Violin Solo, a piece that holds vivid personal memories for her. The recording is constrained by the 3-minute duration of a 16-mm film roll, resulting in periodic interruptions as de Boer reloads the new film. The screen turns to black for the minute required to replace the roll while the dance continues and the sound of movement remains audible. During these visual gaps, the audience is drawn into a memory game: just as Loemij relies on recollection to perform, viewers are invited to project the image of her dancing body onto the black screen, guided by sound and the memory of her movements. This interplay of visual absence and auditory presence creates a dissonance that blurs perception, memory, and time.

In his ongoing PROMESA (2024), series—named after the federal legislation known as the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA)—Carlos Reyes examines the privatization of critical infrastructures and public utilities, such as electricity, that emerged in response to Puerto Rico’s 2016 debt crisis. In PROMESA (Caguas), Reyes modifies and conjoins a set of IKEA lamps to create a power connection between San Francisco and Caguas, Puerto Rico, where the artist resides. One light bulb is connected to San Francisco’s electrical grid and provides a stable light source. The other, via an internet connection, translates publicly available data on power outages in Caguas—reported by customers of LUMA Energy, Puerto Rico’s primary electrical supplier—and creates a pulsating effect. The title’s reference to a “promise” underscores the fraught assurance of reliability or certainty: for light to shine in Caguas, a blackout must occur elsewhere on the island. Reyes highlights the complex historical and ongoing power dynamics between the U.S. and its territory, where decisions shaping daily life on the island are made in boardrooms in New York and Washington. The work renders visible the often unseen but deeply felt forces of power that govern the island’s infrastructure and autonomy.

Isabel Nuño de Buen’s Codex (2023) series, can be viewed as archaeological fragments from a distant past or not-so-distant future. These three-dimensional papier-mâché palimpsests are layered with a wide range of materials that evoke both man-made artifacts, such as maps, and the organic world, with forms resembling marine life and fungal growths. Through these open forms, de Buen presents human civilization as an ongoing, multifaceted, and ultimately incomplete project, one where fragments offer partial glimpses of a much larger, ever-shifting, and unknowable whole.

Ishan Clemenco translates the concerns of intonation and duration in music into treatments of surface and volume in constructed sculptures. With n.T. [tablet: 6 chalk-lines; pthalo blue/irgazine yellow/cobalt blue/titanium white] (2018-2024) and n.T. [chalk-line ink block: 15 lines; irgazine yellow/cobalt blue/titanium white] (2022), the artist inscribes blocks of stone and wood: the remnants of long passages from mountains and rainforests and processes of germination, growth, deforestation, quarrying, shipping, and architectural usage. The elements of each of the two works are inverted: a sumi ink-stained wood block sits on a granite stele, while an incised granite tablet rests on a hardwood block. Clemenco employs ancient units of measurement such as the Egyptian djeser and remen to make chalk lines on the black surfaces, which absorb and reflect light and mark and expose intervals of geologic and human-made time.

In Amérika: Bay of Arrows (2016), Ana Vaz explores film as an embodied experience, rooted in a historical encounter in 1492 when Christopher Columbus’ crew, landing on the coast of Samaná (modern-day Dominican Republic), was met with a rain of arrows orchestrated by the Caribbean Taíno, led by chief Enriquillo. Today, the lake named after the Taíno chief bears the effects of climate change, with shrinking waters, species migration, and an expanding coral desert revealing traces of its ecological past. In this work, Vaz examines the enduring impact of colonialism on the landscape and ties the origins of the Anthropocene—the era of human impact on Earth’s systems—to the violent clash between European and Indigenous cultures. Using the camera as an arrow, Amérika: Bay of Arrows re-animates the Taíno act of resistance in the present, evoking arrows launched against a perpetually “falling sky.”

Compass (2021) is a score for a solo electric guitarist to be performed outdoors. The circular score, which resembles a compass, invites the performer to take cues from and engage with their immediate surroundings, which, in turn, inform the composition’s shape and sound. Chacon fosters an acute awareness of the often overlooked sounds produced by the land and its non-human inhabitants, while also reflecting on the growing encroachment of human-made sounds on the natural environment. Although the performer might not be familiar with their exact location, the score guides them in orienting themselves, gathering information from natural elements such as wind, shadows, and animals to determine their position and relationship to the cardinal directions.