Continuing through April 4, 2026

Telematic Media Arts is located in San Francisco near Tenth and Folsom — once the geographical center of the nascent artists’ community South of Market during the mid-1970s, when artists found unoccupied light industrial spaces surrounding the area suddenly available for conversion to live/work spaces. The do-it-yourself results were often crude, punningly referred to as not living up to their “lofty ideals.” Jennifer Locke’s video installation is a throwback to those days when artists built sheetrock and two-by-four studios in those spaces. Locke has employed those materials to make the set for the two videos on view here. 

One video documents an artist’s task-like action in a manner that harks back to the early days of video from a half-century past.“Passing Through” (2025) occupies a small room with two large screens facing each other from about ten feet apart. Two videos are projected simultaneously, so we must choose to turn our back on one to see the other. Both document a female figure dressed in white from head to toe, equipped with only a claw hammer with which she punches a hole through a white sheetrock wall. When the hole is large enough, she steps through it. The four-minute ten-second performance concludes and then repeats. 

On the opposite wall we see the same procedure from the other side of the wall. This image records the wooden studs in the wall and the hammerhead-sized holes punched through it, as well as the gypsum dust and torn paper flapping like tongues around the growing mouth of a hole. As the room reverberates with the woman’s uncomfortably loud, repetitive blows — a percussion performance — one can stand exactly between the two projections and reflexively flinch as her weapon flies out towards us before she pulls it back over her shoulder in preparation for the next blow.

By intention, early performance artworks were not about theatrical tradition or even acting. They were a form of sculpture in limited time, usually about the nature of an artist’s body in space amidst architecture, taking on some measure of risk for both artist and viewer. Locke’s performer is depersonalized, covered in white clothing that adds to her non-emotive intentions. Her swings become a little bit slower as she tires, reiterating that this is not make believe but real physical effort.

Locke invokes so many artists from the 1970s that the piece can be understood as an homage to her teachers’ generation (Locke earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006). The influential Jim Melchert’s slide show works, in which he would depict a student painting or cutting paper walls that magically return to wholeness or allowing the performer to defy logic, is the clearest example. 

At the same time, South of Market artists like Jim Pomeroy, Jock Reynolds, and David Ireland brought master carpentry skills to bear in their installations. The wooden studs-revealed-behind-the-walls aesthetic echoes the Los Angeles painter Richard Jackson, who in those years exhibited the backs of his paintings, or stacks of them. Locke’s own white form also references carved plaster figures by Manuel Neri.

There is a second, smaller video piece on view on a nearby wall titled “Given: 1. Ice, 2. Candle” (2024). It, too, is an homage, this time from a historical perspective, to Marcel Duchamp, and, specifically, his late masterpiece, “Étants Donnes” (1946-1966). Wearing the same white ouitfit, Locke positions herself on her back holding up a lamp, in the same pose as the nude seen through the peephole in Duchamp’s door. In Locke’s homage, we look through a gash in a wall, akin to the one seen in “Passing Through.” Without fussily trying to recreate the details of “Étants Donnes,” Locke manages to update its power. One’s heart skips a beat when seeing the earlier work manifested in crisp video with a live model. The sped-up tape allows us to better see her taking breaths or making involuntary body adjustments. Locke also sneaks in yet another nod to a first-generation San Francisco conceptualist. A block of ice is seen melting in the background, a reference to Paul Kos’ “Sound of the Ice Melting” (1970) and subsequent related sculptures and videos Kos realized in the 1970s and 80s.

For centuries artists have been thinking about how our bodies pass through architecture. This is not a new consideration. For example, Andrea Palladio’s Villa Barbaro, at Maser in northern Italy, is a 16th century architectural treasure in which Paolo Veronese painted a number of frescoes. In a long, narrow hall halfway between two end walls, painted on the facing wall is a trompe l’oeil door, behind which a female servant pokes her head out and smiles flirtatiously. Turn 180 degrees and on the opposite wall a male servant is doing the same thing. The visitor finds their body unexpectedly located in the midst of a domestic comedy. Locke’s pair of video installations update this tradition, which now forces us to decide which way to turn to best understand the process of a changing environment.