Service Tension, San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery
By: Sienna Freeman
Nestled between two large doorways on the back wall of the San Francisco Arts Commission's (SFAC) main gallery hangs Autumn Wallace's painting Use Case, 2022. The canvas, just over five and a half feet tall, towers over viewers and barely contains a churning mass of hybrid human-animal parts that evoke the simultaneous doubling and merging of more than one figure—swirling with an implied centrifugal force, shades of hazy violet and blue render sinuous extremities, subtle undersides, and suggestive openings. Squeezed in the middle of the heap, an upside-down face emerges: grimaced, disoriented, tooth missing, and jaw clenched—deep red as if boiling with pressure. Rapture and agony appear in proxy, as a second face, perhaps a double of the first, recedes behind a nearby purple hoof-like appendage. Its mouth is agape and eager–poised to receive a single drop of white liquid–with eyes rolled back, summoning the essence of Caravaggio's Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy.
Above: Autumn Wallace, Use Case, 2022, Acrylic, oil, and pastel on unstretched canvas, 67 1⁄2 x 41 1⁄4 inches, Courtesy of The Hum of Progress, New York and London, the Artist, and Gaa, New York and Cologne, Photo credit: Aaron Wojack.
Wallace's Use Case anchors a provocative and playful investigation into the messiness and complexity of the queer body, as part of the group exhibition Service Tension, curated by Elena Gross and Leila Weefur. Interpretations of troubling notions of masculinity within queer dynamics and sexual desire are embodied across various mediums, perspectives, practices, and aesthetics, transforming the gallery "into a space where power dynamics are not just displayed but actively negotiated" [1] with the viewer, and relationally between objects themselves.
Above: Autumn Wallace, Use Case, 2022, Detail, Acrylic, oil, and pastel on unstretched canvas, 67 1⁄2 x 41 1⁄4 inches, Courtesy of The Hum of Progress, New York and London, the Artist, and Gaa, New York and Cologne, Photo courtesy of the writer’s phone.
Sasha Kelley, Portraits of Chocolate Chip, 2017, Photo printed on Photo Text, 115 x 78 inches, Courtesy of the Artist, Photo credit: Aaron Wojack.
Caddy-corner from Use Case is Sasha Kelley's Portraits of Chocolate Chip, 2017. The work consists of two large-format color photographs, stacked one on top of another, each measuring about 5ft tall. The top image is adhered directly to the wall with no frame, showing Chip in front of a dented "seamless" gray paper background, on all fours, head tilted, making direct eye contact with the camera. The lighting is harsh, forming a deep shadow doubling the nude figure, whose tattooed chest and upper torso cranes over the bottom of the picture plane.
The bottom image is also raw-paper adhered to an inclined ramp that adjoins the wall to the floor. Inversely mirroring the figure's position above, Chip's bottom double reclines, midsection presented, maintaining direct eye contact, only this time smiling. The grey paper beneath them rolls up the ramp and meets the bottom edge of the top image, mimicking the setup of an actual seamless photo backdrop. Despite creating an obvious seam, it provides a critical space for the viewer's eyes to rest in this work, should they decide to avoid direct confrontation.
Ricki Dwyer, Psychically Milked, 2023, Woven cottons and linen, chrome platted cast brass kisses, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the Artist, Photo credit: Aaron Wojack.
Across the room, Ricki Dwyer's installation Psychically Milked, 2023, presents further inquiry into notions of positionality, materiality, and uncertain somatic terrain. Draped dip-dyed woven fabric and industrial two-by-fours create the structure of the expansive piece. A strange striped body is hinted at, as metaphorical wings or abstract limbs straddle or hover, consuming much of the air space. To approach the work, the viewer must step inside an ancillary room and bend around parts of the object to explore its many folds and undulations.
Ricki Dwyer, Psychically Milked, 2023, Detail, Woven cottons and linen, chrome platted cast brass kisses, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the Artist, Photo courtesy of the writer’s phone.
From different vantage points, one discovers that tiny Hershey Kisses appear sporadically placed along the tops of each of the two-by-fours securing the fabric in place just above the viewer's head. Outside the room, a clear wall-hung plexi cabinet displays twelve more Kisses, chrome-plated in cast brass. They beckon to the viewer as protected, precious artifacts and beg the question: what does it mean to make something so delicate and volatile become the source of holding such material and symbolic weight? Toying with perception and troubling notions around fixed and rigid positions, such as top and bottom, or other binary states, the work unapologetically anchors a sense of freedom rooted in precarious restraint.
Service Tension, Installation View, Featuring works by Salimatu Amabebe, Ricki Dwyer, Xandra Ibarra, Sasha Kelley, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Autumn Wallace, Photo credit: Aaron Wojack.
The feeling of being at once grounded and unbound is one that writer Sara Ahmed explores in her seminal book Queer Phenomenology. Emphasizing the concept of "orientation," Ahmed examines both in the literal sense of bodies in space, and the metaphorical sense of how social norms and power structures "orient" individuals toward (or away from) certain objects, experiences, and paths. Ahmed uses the well-trodden metaphor of exploring a room blindfolded to consider orientation and disorientation.[2] In a familiar room, one can typically "extend themselves" and feel their way around once they know what direction they are facing based on the position of their body. However, in an unfamiliar room, where "contours are not part of our memory map," it is not so easy, even if you know what direction your body is facing. She says, "space then becomes a question of 'turning,' of directions taken, which will not only allow things to appear, but also enable us to find our way through the world by situating ourselves in relation to such things." [3]
Service Tension, Installation View, Featuring works by Salimatu Amabebe, Xandra Ibarra, Sasha Kelley, and Autumn Wallace, Photo credit: Aaron Wojack.
Wandering through Service Tension, where curators Gross and Weefur aim for viewers "to become implicated in these scenes of intimacy, forced to confront their own position as voyeur, participant, or something beautifully in-between," [4] one is presented by multi-faceted stellar works by Salimatu Amabebe, Ricki Dwyer, Xandra Ibarra, Sasha Kelley, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Autumn Wallace. For viewers well versed in the visual language of kink, the olfactory cocktail of materials such as leather and Polyurethane rubber mixing, or the nuanced complexity and history of queer culture, the show may feel like a room where one could "extend themselves" intuitively in various directions, even when metaphorically "blindfolded" walking in as a first time viewer. However, for folks entering into the space as a room less traveled, one that presents its viewer with a brand new type of vocabulary, there is an opportunity for new types of connections to be made. Viewers are invited to "turn" in unfamiliar directions and get caught up in new meaning, or elicit new interpretations on a theme that is in some ways quite universal: how bodies create, wield, and navigate power in social space–and in this particular case, also civic space.
Service Tension, Installation View, Featuring works by Xandra Ibarra and Autumn Wallace, Photo credit: Aaron Wojack.
Show Info:
Service Tension, A group exhibition curated by Elena Gross and Leila Weefur. Featuring work by Salimatu Amabebe, Ricki Dwyer, Xandra Ibarra, Sasha Kelley, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Autumn Wallace. SFAC Main Gallery in the War Memorial Veterans Building. On view through August 23, 2025.
Citations:
1. https://www.sfartscommission.org/experience-art/exhibitions/service-tension
2. Ahmed, Sara, Queer Phenomenology, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2026, page 7.
3. Ahmed, Sara, Queer Phenomenology, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2026, page 6.
4. https://www.sfartscommission.org/experience-art/exhibitions/service-tension
