BOXBLUR 2024 / Catharine Clark Gallery

In 2016, Catharine Clark founded BOXBLUR, an initiative to bring visual and performing art into dialogue within the gallery. BOXBLUR often collaborates with other organizations that amplify communal values. Artist and performer collaborators include Rufus Wainwright, Catherine Galasso, Benjamin Freemantle, and Angelo Greco, Adji Cissoko, Michael Montgomery, Emma Lanier, Cauveri Suresh, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Monique Jenkinson/Fauxnique, Indira Allegra, Kambui Olujimi, Jen Bervin, and Shimon Attie, among many others.

BOXBLUR is a fiscally sponsored project of Dance Film SF and central to its efforts is its partnership with the San Francisco Dance Film Festival.

BOXBLUR hosts and produces socially engaged performative projects that are often experimental and are realized in conversation with a visual artist’s work.

2024 Programming:

February 16 - 17: BOXBLUR and EXiT present "In Remembrance": A Program of Music Curated by Shinji Eshima

This event is curated by Shinji Eshima in response to Chris Doyle and Chester Arnold’s work, currently on view at Catharine Clark Gallery through March 2, 2024.

Shinji Eshima offers the following remarks: “August 6th - the tile of my composition, which will be performed at Catharine Clark Gallery - is the date of the Hiroshima atomic bomb in 1945. My mother was born in Hiroshima. I spent some time contemplating this piece while sitting in the very room where J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to develop this weapon. The piece hints at Haiku in meter, trying, if just briefly, to express the unspeakable.” Eshima's August 6th premiered at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco on August 6, 1995, the 50th anniversary.

Shinji Eshima has been a double-bassist in the San Francisco Opera since 1980. He has also served as Associate Principal Bass in the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra since 1982. He has taught classical bass at San Francisco State University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Stanford University, San Francisco School of the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Born in Berkeley, CA in 1956 to a Japanese American family, Mr. Eshima has written over 30 works including ballets, operas, hymns, choruses, solos, chamber pieces and soundtracks. An audio recording of his first work for San Francisco Ballet, RAkU, was released in 2012 and a documentary about the ballet, Fire and Ashes: Making the Ballet RAkU premiered in 2017. His most recent major commission is Zheng, a new opera about the late Chinese-born, American mezzo-soprano, Zheng Cao. His first full length ballet, Snow White, premiered with Carolina Ballet in March 2022.

Mr. Eshima graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Music from Stanford University and a Master of Music degree from the Juilliard School. He was the recipient of the Stanford Humanities Award and was honored by the city of Berkeley with a declaration on December 6, 2011 as "Shinji Eshima Day" for his contribution to the Arts.

Thank you,

Catharine Clark, Founding Director of BOXBLUR

Catharine Clark Gallery’s BOXBLUR Initiative is a fiscally sponsored program by Dance Film SF, a California registered 501(c)(3) arts organization. All donations to BOXLBUR are tax-deductible.

Image caption: Chris Doyle, detail of Newly Fallen #7, 2021. Watercolor on paper, mounted to three panels. 96 x 144 inches.

Your donation in support of BOXBLUR is fully tax-deductible, through Catharine Clark Gallery’s partnership with Dance Film SF, a registered tax exempt 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Federal ID# 45-5001060. No goods or services will be provided in exchange for the contribution.