Abstract Objects of Devotion Opening Reception (SF)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Abstract Objects of Devotion 

by San Francisco-based artist 

Amy Trachtenberg

500 Capp Street Foundation is pleased to present Abstract Objects of Devotion, a solo exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Amy Trachtenberg.

Spanning sculpture, painting, installation, and language the exhibition unfolds through a series of intimate gestures and spatial propositions developed in dialogue with David Ireland’s former home and studio. Returning to a decades-long exchange with Ireland that began in the late 1980s, Trachtenberg approaches the house not simply as a site of exhibition, but as a living structure of memory, friendship, transmission, and reflection.

“The house is a refuge, a studio, a lab, a depot, an invitation, a magnet, a tuning fork, a plinth, a lookout, a lighthouse.” — Amy Trachtenberg

Across the exhibition, folded and crumpled steel mesh and linen structures, silver pigment, ochre soil, human hair, bronze casts, poems, and archival correspondence become carriers of duration and attention. Each piece unfolds less as a fixed object than as a site of conversation: part poem, part proposition, part accumulated trace. Throughout the exhibition, materials gather into arrangements that resemble forms of concrete poetry assembled across space.

The exhibition also revisits the long correspondence between Trachtenberg and Ireland: letters, postcards, aerogrammes, collages, observations, and exchanges that unfolded over decades between artists deeply invested in material thinking and everyday transformation. Their friendship forms an underlying architecture throughout the exhibition.

Trachtenberg’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, collage, sculpture, installation, language, public commissions, theater and dance design in collaborative works. Her hybrid approach explores the emotional, political, and perceptual charge embedded within materials and the experience between objects, space, and memory.

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