Gabrielle Teschner. In the Offing, 2016; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Irving Street Projects.

“The offing” is the farthest point the eye can see when looking at the ocean from shore. It is the lateral strip of water that concludes the earthly side of the horizon, and is the recipient of both the first and last kiss of light as the day begins and ends. Elementally the offing has a physical, water-saturated truth, although it is intangible; by definition, the offing is an unreachable place, a place that must keep its distance to keep its name. Metaphorically, the offing is that something far in the future that we anticipate, make assumptions about, and lose sleep over, even as it continues to occupy a very unreal and ill-defined shape. It is this kind of anticipatory thinking that imbues the works of artist Gabrielle Teschner in her current show, In the Offing, a rotating installation of works on fabric and paper made during Teschner’s three-month residency at Irving Street Projects (ISP), a conjoint studio and exhibition space in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.

Marrying method and material, Teschner has made a ritual of walking the six blocks from ISP to the Pacific Ocean daily to collect seawater throughout her residency. Back in the studio, Teschner mixes the seawater with watercolor pigments to create mottled oceanic hues that she washes onto blocks of unbleached muslin. Blocks painted on different days have distinct dispositions. They—along with the handful of typed haikus that are taped to the front window and a sequence of notational paper cups lining the sill—are a book of days, a calendar of Teschner’s processional.

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Katie Paterson. The Dying Star Letters, 2010–present; ink on paper; dimensions variable; installation view, Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, 2013. Courtesy of the Artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai.

Night, in most latitudes, is characterized by darkness: a dimming of the sky that is often accompanied by the dimming of the senses, and the mind. But our eyes can and do adjust to this darkness, and as our shadowed surroundings surrender a certain clarity—becoming amorphous in form and color—the world may appear, to us, anew. In Jewish tradition, as noted by Renny Pritikin and Lily Siegel, curators of the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s exhibition Night Begins the Day: Rethinking Space, Time, and Beauty, the sun’s trajectory toward the horizon is a harbinger: Nightfall is the first spark of a new day. The show hinges on this inversion of ingrained timetables and asks us to question our relation to the Earth and its celestial bodies, the murky beauty of our natural (and at times mundane) surroundings, and also our own destruction of those surroundings. The twenty-five contemporary artists, scientists, and others included in the show put forth a remarkable “dusking,” asking viewers to embrace the rich sublimity that is to be discovered in the dark.

Disrupting the notion of any singular moment of creation, the German artist Peter Dreher’s Tag um Tag Guter Tag (Day by Day, Good Day, 1974–ongoing) is a series, to date involving 5,000 artworks, that is continually in the making. Once or twice a week, Dreher paints the same water glass, holding the same amount of water, sitting on the same table beside the same window, in an oil painting of the same dimensions. Time is measured here by an unchanging, quotidian relationship to a single object. Numbered and displayed in a grid, the paintings (and days) are hard to assess individually. And yet each does vary from its neighbor due to the subtle shifts of light Dreher captures in the reflections on the glass. As in nature, sublimity enters and exits this work through the impressive sum of its parts, and microscopically in the infinitesimal gestures that break with what is formulaic and anticipated.

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What Matters to Us?: A Reenactment of Anna Halprin’s Blank Placard Dance, Saturday, May 16, 2015, San Francisco. Photo: Emily Holmes.

Emerging one by one from the doors of San Francisco’s Mission Cultural Center, thirty-six white-shirted performers nimbly and stoically perched between parking meters, ready for the opening beats of the performance that was about to unfold. Standing shoulder to shoulder in one long row, they silently gazed out onto the street’s two-way flux of traffic. The expressions on their faces mirrored the signs they held above their heads: Both were blank.

What Matters to Us? (May 16, 2015) was the inaugural event of Dances for Anna: A Worldwide Celebration of Anna Halprin’s 95th Year, a series of performances taking place over the next three months across sixteen countries. Organized by the Tamalpa Institute (the dance and expressive arts therapy nonprofit cofounded by Halprin and her daughter Daria), and directed by Associate Director Rosario Sammartino, Dances for Anna is a tribute to a choreographer whose work and teachings have rigorously challenged traditional definitions of dance, informing and influencing many threads of experimental movement since the late 1930s.

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