SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The contemporary role of option provides an illusion to allay a sense of entrapment in our daily structure quieting a never-ending loop of collapsed feedback by promise of change reliant on option. In regards to this illusionary state (that one is free to decide upon change when presented with what is assumed as an option but is essentially a corroded strategy for sameness), is the idea that one accepts what is offered or receives more of the same resulting in no option at all. The construct of option accelerates the fallacy of a personal elect in a daily ultimatum game as it pertains to our current social climate.

The invisible arena of option is an event in and of itself requiring a provocation of its pre-programmed cultural aim to expose its true boundary. In a time where traditional protest methodology proves outmoded in ability and information networks reflect strategy over dialogue, the options provided to individuals seeking change arrive pre-coded circumventing active alterations, blind of intention – a continual Hobson’s choice. Contemporary option as we know it, when assumed as a freedom-based exercise in individual power, is largely impotent as an act of defiance against the system it develops within. Yet freedom, reliant on option and the allowance it seeks in suggestion of actual self-governing, is heralded as our greatest asset. Given our options, the clock rewinds and the positions shift within the same structure.

Realizing the potential of each work individually or taken as a whole, Option to the Death of Freedom attempts to allow a continual inquiry beyond the half-life of contemporary option, a mediation presented as crossing many complex and current social issues. Contributing artists exhibit practices that allow for transparency and literalism while at times allowing materialism a central charge. As an appeal against the false nature of option in the wake of considered societal, economic, and cultural freedoms, the exhibition allows expression of protest and in some cases visual confrontation towards the lack of true clarity.

Andrew Tosiello presents a revised value of authorship through an algorithmic lottery in WHATSANAUTHOR,THEDEATHOFTHEAUTHOR,PIERREMENARD,AUTHOROFTHEQUIXOTE (2016). The seminal texts by Foucault (1969), Barthes (1967) and Jorge Luis Borges (1939) are reassembled in python code and presented in an algorithmic order rendering the concentrations meaningless.

Mads Lynnerup exposes realities of the economically disenfranchised and marginalised through a selection of his 2007-09 silkscreen posters, Build More Luxury Condoms, Now Firing, and If You See Anything Interesting Let Someone Know Immediately, the former being a slogan derived from the anti-terrorist posters produced for the M.T.A. during the post-9/11 climate (If you see something, say something), working as a preemptive approach to acts of the “un-American.”

John Edmonds ‘Hoods’ (2016-17) presents cultural identification through photographic representation, herein specifically blackness and maleness. Through his photographs Edmonds confirms the paradox of a simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility witnessed through highly racialized visual markers, and evidenced through a continued culture of violence based on the “other”. Using elements of controlled imagery (a faceless hooded portrait), Edmonds reproduces the conditions of a visual artificial boundary as demonstrative of the racially-driven structures that attempt to equally dominate and diminish the experience of blackness through the process of racialization.

Evidence (1977) by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel is considered a seminal foundation in conceptual practice based in photographic mediums that attempt to decentralize narrative and authorship. In this way Sultan and Mandel present the issue of ownership- visual or causal, to examine American corporations, institutions and agencies tasked with the technological advancement of American future, while presenting a stationless visual sequence for consideration.

Frank Heath addresses the tension between the human and the mechanical, the successes and grave failures of communication and its breakdown. In Made to be Found (2014), two filmmakers seek props and direction in the aisles of a department store, the words of CERN physicists overseeing the Large Hadron Collider echoing in their heads. Made to be Found considers the relationship between the technologies pushing us toward collapse and the apocalyptic scenarios we incessantly invent.

Whitney Claflin’s site specific installation ‘Forget Marriage’ is created directly on the wall through lighter burns.

Dan Herschlein’s practice revolves around the amateur and exploratory pursuit of psyche through the horror genre. Inner turmoil and the weight of expectation as it pertains to the reaction and morphing of the body ultimately confronts one’s emotional limit. This nihilistic sort of romanticism and its aftermath of physical detritus becomes symbols of the inevitable failure of transcendence, and what it means to be human.

William Koone explores how contemporary visual rhetoric is constructed by bringing into focus the physical support systems that facilitate it. Koone utilizes photographic tropes, such as commercial backdrops, to illuminate the production and fabrication of images. Utilizing a variety of media, Koone’s objects describe our contemporary culture, where the commercial image is ubiquitous. All capital generated by the sale of Koone’s work is fully directed into The Stipend, a Bay Area-based grant initiative co-founded by Koone, financially assisting artists to realize exhibitions locally.

Nicolás Lamas attempts to render various historical inconsistencies generated by representation. Damnatio memoriae (2013) takes its approach from the modern Latin phrase literally meaning “condemnation of memory”.