A Video Exhibition Curated for Popwerks 

Traffic spelled with a K is less about the concrete associations of “getting around” the city and more about tenuous notions of “getting by” (connections, exchanges and passages).  Fraught metro scenarios of inclusion and exclusion can pivot around having or lacking a ticket, such as ownership of a home in a particular neighborhood or failing to have papers verifying a home address.  Traffik is the disciplining of urban subjects through borders of plate glass, front and back doors, surveillance, freeways, guns, bombs, differences of scale, seats on the bus and natural disasters.  We are compelled to respond to Kafkaesque climates of fear that can determine the street to park on and even the jokes to tell.  Artists from the San Francisco Art Institute offer this exhibition as a synergistic salute to our “right to the city” – the freedoms of assembly, association and movement.

S. Ellis, January 2009