RILIEVI

What does it mean to stay when everyone else is leaving? This is the question that haunts Rilievi, not because the four young artists here—Claire Bivins, Annabel de Vries, Stella Kudritzki, Leonardo Perez Cruz—set out to answer it, but because their work embodies it.

In the past decade, twenty-somethings in San Francisco dropped from 18% to 14% of the population. The steepest decline of any major American city. But here are four recent California College of the Arts graduates who chose to remain, to make work that insists on slowness in a place that has forgotten how to breathe. Rilievi, Italian for “reliefs,” also suggests what emerges under pressure.

Bivins makes ceramic sculptures that seem to be contemplating their own sexuality: playful, earthy things that split the difference between ancient ritual and contemporary neurosis. De Vries photographs her family with the kind of clear-eyed affection that hurts to look at. Her pictures of the Northern California coast don’t romanticize anything; they just show you what’s there.

Kudritzki documents girlhood and family through her teenage sisters in Bolinas, catching that peculiar California light that makes everything look both eternal and doomed. Perez Cruz works in sculpture and photography to explore what he calls “the interior”—that space where we perform ourselves, especially when we think no one is watching.

What’s striking is how these artists refuse the current art world’s addiction to big gestures and bigger statements. Instead, they offer the radical proposition that paying attention might be enough. Their work accumulates meaning the way dust accumulates on windowsills—gradually, inevitably, until you notice how much has gathered.

The curatorial premise about pressure and emergence could have been heavy-handed, but the work carries it lightly. These aren’t manifestos; they’re observations. And in a city increasingly hostile to the young and the broke, making quiet, thoughtful art feels like its own form of civil disobedience.

RILIEVI is the third of our Emerging Artists Series and opens on August 1st and is on view through September 13th at The Jones Institute at 963 Hayes Street, San Francisco, by appointment info@thejonesinstitute.com