JULIE CHANG

Headlands Center for the Arts is pleased to present Close Calls: 2008. This exhibition commemorating the best in Bay Area emerging art is now in its sixth year. Each year in January and February, while our Artist in Residence programs are in recess, we open our Project Spaces to host this exhibition as an effort to further support and showcase the great breadth of talent in our region.

Close Calls: 2008 provides another opportunity to highlight the extraordinary caliber of work being produced by Headlands applicants in the Bay Area, to build a community of peers among these artists and to engage them with Headlands’ audiences. This year’s exhibition is divided into two thematic groupings, dictated by trends apparent in the work of the selected artists. In the Eastwing Project Space, the works on view tend toward engagement with the artists’ physical environments, whether natural landscapes or manmade architectures. In the Westwing Project Space, the works engage with the artists’ social environments, which may include family, immediate community or the global network enabled by contemporary media. The forms these artworks take range from drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, film, video and interactive media.Headlands Center for the Arts received an unprecedented 256 applications from visual, media and interdisciplinary artists to its prestigious and highly competitive California Artist in Residence (AIR) program in 2007. Of this pool, our funding enabled us to invite six to participate in the residency program in 2008. They were selected by Visual Arts jurors Leigh Markopoulos, then director of Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, and now Chair of the Curatorial Practice department at California College of the Arts, and Kathy Aoki, artist and 2003 Headlands AIR; as well as Interdisciplinary juror Svea Vezzone, Director of Swarm Gallery, Oakland; and Media Arts juror Trena Noval, an independent curator, writer, artist and educator based in Richmond.