Cube Space Gallery
Visit our gallery in downtown Berkeley to discover our curated series of temporary art installations made by Bay Area artists.
The Cube Space occupies a small store front in the heart of downtown Berkeley at 2010 Addison Street, between Milvia Street and Shattuck Avenue. This sidewalk exhibition venue is unlike other traditional gallery spaces where the public enter the exhibition space; instead, exhibitions are viewed by the public from three glass walls viewable at all hours, every day of the week.
Current Exhibition
The last muffled breaths of the undead masculine by Weston Teruya
April - June, 2024
For this exhibition Weston Teruya creates paper sculpture using cast papier-mâché, integrating recycled office supplies, soil gathered from former environmental impact sites, and electronic components. Over the course of this exhibition, this installed mechanism will change, grow, and fall apart. The sculpture will turn in on itself, breaking itself apart. Rather than reveling in the destruction, the artist invites viewers to see the artwork’s disintegration as part of an ongoing process of exhalation: Reminding us that we breathe to clear space for a cycle of new growth.
Weston Teruya is an artist and cultural organizer who moves between individual and collective modes of practice to explore personal and community responses to inequity and fragmentation, with listening and inquiry as the starting point for creative reflection and making. His individual art practice draws on the interplay of research and material exploration to create sculptural installations–often from a variety of paper-based media. In those sculptures, he examines the social dynamics, textures, and histories of specific sites and communities.
westonteruya.com
Past Exhibitions
Khepri by Ebti Shedid
January - March 2024
Khepri
God of creating – rebirth- morning sun
Becoming into being daily
I die again and rise again and again
With every death comes a re-birth.
Loss results in abundance.
The sun sets every night and comes up every day.
An endless cycle of death and rebirth
Khepri is a material meditation on the cycle of life and death. Khepri, also referred to as dongbeetle, represented rebirth in ancient Egypt. Holding this history, Ebti believes the lightbulb in the space represents the essence of her late father’s spirit —a mark of rebirth. Informed by her family’s making-traditions and antique gallery, she incorporates relics that attempt keep cultural and personal memory close with a deep understanding that loss is inevitable.
IG: @ebtiebtiebti
www.ebti.art
Curated by Leila Weefur
Throughway by Kerri Conlon
October – December 2023
Kerri Conlon’s installation, Throughway, is a material meditation on societal transformation within human networks and the interconnectivity required for them to form and bond. As with most social structures, this work also sees the potential for collapse. Inspired by the intricate design of lobster traps, the work visualizes the network as a series of actions and beliefs looped together to initiate change. Each of its corners and peaks builds a pattern that curves back and forth making a path along the edges of the space, and terminates with an upholstered umbrella tail bead hat receives the impact of the undulating form.
Conlon’s study of structure and architecture is evidenced in her ability to explore the possibility of change using a material that is strong enough to contain a mass but can be broken with the right amount of pressure. It is a reminder of the human capacity to make a social impact amidst the chaos.
IG: @kerriconlonstudio
Kerriconlon.com
Curated by Leila Weefur
been here by Charles Lee
July 1 – September 30, 2023
been here. is an excavation of the archive containing evidence in this poetic narrative of the African American Cowboy. Charles Lee’s installation of found objects is a reliquary that cultivates a deeper understanding of American iconography and uncovers the misconception that often surrounds familiar cultural representations, such as the American Cowboy. By using the archive as a resource to build a more inclusive and accurate vision this work embraces the complexities of our shared history, and facilitates a sense of belonging and community. Inspired by his family's migration story, which like most Black Americans in California means movement West from the Jim Crow South, Lee is examining, through deep research, the ways cultural heritage shapes contemporary American Life. His sculptural compositions illustrate a thoughtful narrative asserting historical presence on behalf of his family and the greater history of the Black Cowboy.
Curated by Leila Weefur
SIN DOMINGOS by Pablo Tut
January 27 – May 21, 2023
SIN DOMINGOS - (sin: without) (domingos: Sundays) is a sacred day of rest, as it was the day that God rested after finishing the world’s creation. Drawing inspiration from the double meaning of this phrase Without Sundays/ Sinful Sundays, this installation is an abstract representation of the crucifixion, a multilinear crucifixion. Nested in a hammock lays an undetermined body referencing the figure of Christ, with an arbitrary number of nails in various locations. The design of the hammock is one that you would typically see from the peninsula of Yucatan, Mexico where the artist is from. This bodily form is also a tired worker whose rest in the hammock is interrupted by this stream of wire. This juxtaposition of objects is a commentary on how resting, especially on Sundays, is perceived as sinful in an exploitative work culture. Tut offers an interrelated flow of cultural tensions between objects that illustrate what results from the hybridization of work and rest.
@pablo_tut
pablotut.com
Curated by Leila Weefur
Structures, by Cathy Lu and Tracy Ren
September 30, 2022 – January 8, 2023
This collaborative work by Cathy Lu and Tracy Ren explores the structures that hold our communities and ourselves together through time and space. Bags of ceramic fruits and photographs of hands printed on fabric hang off a bamboo composition inspired by the scaffolding used for construction in Hong Kong.
The ceramic forms are based on fruits sourced from local Chinese American produce markets, while the photographs are selections from Tracy's family archive. Together, the work focuses on fleeting relational moments between family members, and the objects and skills that are passed down through generations.
Cruising into Becoming, by Leonard Reidelbach
January 29 – August 19, 2022
Leonard Reidelbach’s installation cruising into becoming is a material, spiritual and social exploration of embodiment. Through an emphasis on touch and intimacy, this work urges you to cruise toward your own recessed desires. The images resting on the surface of these materials build a poetic texture to an alternate world. If you look closely, a pattern emerges which transports the past and recontextualizes itself across time and space.
Curated by Leila Weefur.
Trans Boxing: Remote Pictures, by Nolan Hanson and Ada Jane McNulty
August 21 – December 19, 2021
For their exhibition in the Cube Space Gallery, artists Nolan Hanson and Ada Jane McNulty invite the public to view archival materials from the past year of Trans Boxing. The multimedia installation includes a portrait series, screenshots from virtual classes, and other visual material produced by participants, alongside sculptural elements which evoke the experiential and aesthetic qualities of a boxing gym.
Trans Boxing is an ongoing co-authored art project in the form of a boxing club that centers trans and gender variant people. The project shifts in response to context and conditions and continuously reimagines possibilities for social engagement. Trans Boxing was founded in 2017 by Nolan Hanson and is housed in New York City. Ada Jane McNulty is an artist living in New York City. She spends her time in photography, boxing, skateboarding, and anti-capitalist organizing.
Curated by Leila Weefur.