PLAySPACE, The Paulette Long and Shepard Pollack Art Community Experiment, is an exhibition program currently located in the back of the Nave of CCA's Main Building at 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco. The program provides the resources for student artists and curators to conceptualize and present programming that is oriented toward the academic community. PLAySPACE was founded by CCA's Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice in 2005 and is currently administered by the Exhibitions & Public Programs department.

View installation images of highlighted PLAySPACE exhibitions 2016–2024

PLAySPACE Gallery's fall 2024 season gives itself over to uncanniness.

The opening show of the season, Long Lost, reconciles the work of past and present students, transforming the gallery into a homecoming venue. The reunion inspires questions of memory, distortion, home, inaccessibility, and distance. As a composed exhibit, works from current students (such as Angela Zamora, Haley Mae, and Eve) and alumni (including Narges Poursadeqi, Djinnaya Stroud, and Ashley Martin-Prideaux) complicate interpretations about childhood, family, safety, and collective experience. This refusal of neat returns and easy answers reflects the precariousness of pasts, homes, and histories.

Long Lost will run from Sunday, September 22 to Sunday, October 20.

The subsequent show, scheduled to open in late October, builds on the notions of home and strangeness/estrangement that Long Lost unearths. It will collect small works and the art of miniatures to position viewers externally; their gaze existing outside looking into homes, spaces, experiences, and interiors at large.

Image credit Narges Poursadeqi, still from Fragile Memories (video).

Giorgie O'Keeffe DePaolis (they/them) is a second year graduate student in the Visual and Critical Studies (MA) program at CCA. O'Keeffe DePaolis recognizes creativity as a means to connect people, build relationships, and foster solidarity. Their curatorial debut in April 2024 showed them the potential for exhibitions to produce a gathering table for artists and amplify important local voices. Curatorial, O'Keeffe DePaolis collaborates with artists to display works that source inspiration from mythology, ancestry, memory, intimacy, mystery, and other alternative epistemologies. Academically, their research investigates how visual aesthetics emerge from DIY art scenes in San Francisco, contextualized by the City's bohemianism and history of economic stress. Each of these pursuits is a part of a larger goal to cultivate joy and sincerity in a strangely changing world.

Contact

For visitor information, please see CCA.edu/exhibitions

For information on current and upcoming events, visit the CCA Events Calendar, instagram, or facebook, or contact playspace@cca.edu.