Sherwin Rio, WHAT IF WE COULD RECONFIGURE A SQUARE, 2023
Sherwin Rio’s WHAT IF WE COULD RECONFIGURE A SQUARE (2023) monumentalizes the humble milk crate as the principal appearance of the sovereignty of reconfiguration in nearby Portsmouth Square. On any given day many elders gather in Portsmouth Square around temporary tables made of cardboard to play card or strategy games, sitting on flipped milk crates and small foldable stools. In this context, mobile milk crates are the common-person’s everyday, transitory, self-chosen, self-provided, self-determined infrastructure of the park. By highlighting as art the very tool local community elders use to assert their own sovereignty of space, the artwork will celebrate their permanence.
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In its interior, the installation includes text and video taken in Chinatown, North Beach, Portsmouth Square, Russian Hill, and the Financial District. By bringing the viewer on a poetic excursion into a family story-telling, Rio’s personal reflections on Filipinx/American knowledge systems and histories about Portsmouth Square and the International Hotel become the vehicle to further illustrate notions of sovereignty of reconfiguration. An audio element combining sound of wind and a bass-level drone accompany the video.
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Altogether, the installation uses family-autobiographical storytelling of acts of reconfiguration– such as physical adaptive reuse, psychically reframing, or a combination of both– as a metaphor for the Asian and Pacific Islander- American community’s own sovereignty of reconfiguration, which has long-been a tool of autonomy, cultural will, celebration and survival in San Francisco and broader diasporic communities. Whether by expanding the capacity of a material beyond its intended commercial use, or creating loopholes in the face of racist American immigration policies, or temporarily altering the infrastructure of a public square to include various types of makeshift seating for groups playing/watching strategy games, the San Francisco community– particularly surrounding Portsmouth Square in Chinatown– is no stranger to sovereignty of reconfiguration.
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About Sherwin Rio
Sherwin Rio (b. Jacksonville, FL) is an interdisciplinary artist making site-specific and research-based metaphors addressing colonization, historical public amnesia, and intergenerational story-telling through a Filipinx/American lens in the fields of sculpture, installation, video, performance, and audio. Rio has exhibited and performed as a solo and collaborative artist throughout the U.S. in venues such as: Asian Art Museum (San Francisco, CA), La Becque (Switzerland), de Young Museum (San Francisco, CA), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), Carlsbad Museum of Art (NM), San Jose State University (CA), Portland State University (OR), Dominican University (San Rafael, CA), University of Northern Colorado (Greeley), Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA), Torpedo Factory (Alexandria, VA), Dream Farm Commons (Oakland, CA), and SOMArts Cultural Center (San Francisco, CA). He has received awards including a 2022 Research Residency and Solo Exhibition at the David Ireland House at 500 Capp Street Foundation, a 2019 Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts, the 2019 International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, the 2018 Ella King Torrey Award for Innovation & Excellence in the Arts, and the 2017 Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Fellowship Award. Additionally he has been artist-in-residence at Josephine Sculpture Park (Frankfort, KY) and Walkaway House (North Adams, MA). Rio received a dual MFA in Studio Art & MA in History and Theory of Contemporary Art from San Francisco Art Institute in 2019 and a BFA in Printmaking with a minor in Art History from the University of Florida in 2014. Rio lives in Brooklyn and works between New York City and San Francisco.