CCA Wattis Institute
360 Kansas St, San Francisco, CA 94103

We are thrilled to announce Caitlin Cherry's first solo show at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco.

The Regolith Was Boiling is a site-specific installation of large-scale oil paintings and digitally produced prints inspired by the architecture of the Wattis Institute. Conceived as a mural, where an overall visual ripple effect connects individual parts to a larger whole, Cherry has taken countless vignettes from popular social media platforms, Google Image Search, and Getty Images, each one featuring a female celebrity from the Black diaspora. The popularity of the iconic green chiffon dress that Jennifer Lopez wore at the 2000 Grammy Awards, the artist has noted, is what inspired Google executive Eric Schmidt to create Google Images in the first place.

The term “regolith” refers to the loose blanket of dust that makes up the surface of the moon and the planet Mars, and Cherry points to how the tiny elements that make up all types of surfaces—the brushstrokes of a painting, the pixels of an image, or the dust of a planet—come into focus to create big, expansive worlds.

Painted in the artist's distinct style of chromatic distortions and dizzying overabundance, this installation emphasizes the depersonalization of celebrities and dilutes their iconographic status by placing them within a visual sea of others. Like many Black women in American culture, their unique identities are lost, like a speck of dust in the regolith, but are also strengthened by their endlessly shape-shifting representations.

Text excerpt from the Wattis Institute website.

Caitlin Cherry (b. 1987, Chicago) lives and works in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico. She holds an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts and was a recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2016) as well as the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship (2015). Cherry has had solo exhibitions at Perrotin Gallery in New York, Luis de Jesus in Los Angeles, and Luce Gallery in Turin, Italy.

Image courtesy of CCA Wattis Institute and Caitlin Cherry (Photographed by Nicholas Bruno)