So I traveled a great deal: Tisa Walden, Joanne Kyger, and four more Northern California artists at the Matthew Marks Gallery

Featuring six Northern California artists: Tisa Walden (photos from her book, San Francisco in the 21st Century); Joanne Kyger (the 1968 video, Descartes); Jordan Belson (paintings and drawings); Isabella Kirkland (paintings), Jack Mendenhall (paintings); and Robert Strini (ceramics).

The exhibition has been organized by the artist Vincent Fecteau and the curator Jordan Stein, and reflects their interest in the lesser-known, the ahead-of-its-time, the hard-to-classify, the ecstatic, the hermetic, and the strange. The show’s title, which comes from a video in the exhibition by Joanne Kyger*, captures the gregarious and exploratory nature of their curatorial process, as well as the transportive element of the artworks, many of which are exhibited here publicly for the first time.

Recounting the process of selecting the works in the exhibition, its curators, Fecteau and Stein, describe the sense of “ecstatic anxiety” that shaped it: “We saw it in the wave of Kyger’s arms, the fireworks of Belson’s drawings, the obsessiveness of Strini’s sculptures, the taxonomy of Kirkland’s nudibranchia, the mirrored realism of Mendenhall’s paintings, and the other-worldliness of Walden’s photographs. As she writes in ‘Elegy,’ the poem that marks the end of her photobook, ‘It was as if I was wandering in a labyrinth with my hair on fire looking for him.’”

The full title of the exhibition is So I traveled a great deal. I met George, Ebbe, Joy, Philip, Jack, Robert, Dora, Harold, Jerome, Ed, Mike, Tom, Bill, Harvey, Sheila, Irene, John, Michael, Mertis, Gai-fu, Jay, Jim, Anne, Kirby, Allen, Peter, Charles, Drummond, Cassandra, Pamela, Marilyn, Lewis, Ted, Clayton, Cid, Barbara, Ron, Richard, Tony, Paul, Anne, Russell, Larry, Link, Anthea, Martin, Jane, Don, Fatso, Clark, Anja, Les, Sue, and Brian.