Uncool GalleryUncool Gallery
/on view: September 9 to 20, visits by appointment
/public reception: Wednesday, September 16, 6-8 pm
/public talk: Sunday, September 20, 5:30 pm
/presented artist: Alex Ehmer
Artist: Alex Ehmer
Slow Burn brings together works from Alex Ehmer’s ongoing Candles series, in which wax operates as both material and metaphor. Soft, responsive, and continuously capable of change, wax holds traces of touch, labor, ritual, and memory while remaining vulnerable to heat, pressure, and time.
Rooted in personal and familial narratives around the body, care, and experiences within medical systems, the works consider where bodies are held, examined, cared for, or subjected to something. Through accumulation, melting, erosion, and residue, Slow Burn moves between intimacy and exposure, preservation and disappearance, asking how vulnerability can be carried materially and how a body, like wax, requires tending.
Alex Ehmer (b. 1996, San Francisco, CA) is a mixed-media artist based in San Francisco whose practice combines material experimentation with investigations into nontraditional objects and forms. Working primarily with wax, latex, clay, textiles, and sourced or discarded materials, Ehmer explores themes of discardment, repair, bodily vulnerability, and transformation through sculptural processes that blur distinctions between care and damage. Drawing from psychological, medical, and sociological frameworks, their work often incorporates clinical aesthetics, participatory elements, and time-based transformation to examine how lived experience is processed and externalized through material.
Ehmer received a BFA in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2019 and is currently receiving an MFA from California College of the Arts. Their work has been exhibited at 127010, 500 Capp Street, Bass & Reiner, MRKT Gallery, Goodmother Gallery, Induction Gallery, and at SFArts Ed Projects. Alongside their studio practice, Ehmer maintains an independent curatorial practice focused on exhibitions and arts programming throughout the Bay Area, collaborating with artist-run spaces, galleries, and nonprofit institutions. Upcoming exhibitions include ICA San José, SWIM, and Side Bitch Projects.
The public talk brings Alex Ehmer into conversation with invited guest artists Martin Miller and Alice Barreras, moderated by Meghan Smith. Moving between the Bay Area and New York, the discussion considers the realities of building an artistic practice across different communities, institutions, and local art ecosystems, with attention to questions of devotion, discipline, transformation, and sustaining a practice over time.
/Meghan Smith is an independent curator, writer, and arts worker based in Brooklyn, NY. She previously served as the LYRA Foundation Curator at ICA San Francisco, where she produced commission-based exhibitions with artists including David Antonio Cruz, Masako Miki, Maryam Yousif, Hayv Kahraman, and Patrick Martinez. She has also held curatorial and leadership roles at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, CCA PLAySPACE Gallery, and Second Street Gallery. Smith holds a BA from the University of Virginia and an MA from California College of the Arts.
/Martin Miller is a sculptor whose practice engages material, form, and the expanded possibilities of sculpture. He studied at San Francisco Art Institute, where his work developed in dialogue with the New Genres program, and later continued his graduate studies at Hunter College. His work has been exhibited in spaces across the United States.
/Alice Barreras is a painter and member of the Uncool Gallery cohort whose practice is connected to the broader Bay Area arts community. She received her BA in Art from UC Santa Cruz. Her work brings painting into conversation with questions of materiality, image-making, and the networks of exchange that develop between artists and artistic communities.
Each season, one solo show and nine featured artists are presented as part of our ongoing commitment to emerging and critically engaged practices.
