Jonn Herschend, Installation  “Why This is Not Going to Work so Well, a proposal for a project,” PowerPoint Presentation converted to DVD,  4:30, 2005

Alex Clausen, Built with Ghosts, #2, Inkjet print and enamel
on paper, 23.75" x 23.75", 2007

Alex Clausen, Model of a Place I’ve Never Been, #1, Nylon String, super glue, 5” x 9.5”, 2007

Will Rogan, Collapse, video, 2007, TRT: 5 min.40 sec.

Jonn Herschend, Installation “Why This is Not Going to Work
so Well, a proposal for a project,” PowerPoint Presentation converted to DVD, 4:30, 2005

Miriam Dym, Garbage No. 3, coloured pencil on paper,
11”x15” 2006

Melissa Day, How Great Thou Art, video, 2005, TRT: 2 min.

Sarah Cain, Together Alone, mixed media on paper, dyptch,
25 x 25", 2007

Will Rogan, Swans Through, photograph, 40 x 55, 2005

The artists—Sarah Cain, Alex Clausen, Melissa Day, Miriam Dym, Jim Gaylord, Jonn Herschend, Desiree Holman, and Will Rogan—approach the concept from a variety of mediums and standpoints in their individual practices, but taken as a whole their works probe the importance of existing in two conflicting emotional states at the same time: faith and doubt, anger and love, spirituality  and rationality, transcendence and rootedness, ecstasy and melancholia …  This conflict creates an emotional clutter and opens the door to an exploration of existential truth.  

The paintings of Sarah Cain, Jonn Herschend, and Jim Gaylord as well as the mixed media work of Miriam Dym teeter between the abstract and narrative, gridded and intuitive, printed and painted. Both highly realized and tightly controlled visions of complete clutter, these works are emotionally awkward and spiritually honest.

The photographic works of Will Rogan, Alex Clausen, which hover somewhere between documentation and sculpture, are almost deadpan in their cool formal simplicity, but their content implies another dimension through the intense beauty of the mundane or even the emotional absurdity of their subject matter.

The video work of Melissa Day, Jonn Herschend, Desiree Holman, and Will Rogan is both highly structured and emotionally or spiritually melodramatic.  In many cases, there is an irrational rigor, or an absurdity that must be followed as Sol LeWitt stated “absolutely and logically” to its illogical end. 

In all these works, there exists an emotional polarity with references to the Romantic Movement’s preconceptions of an inward search for the sublime.  All the artists’ works seek to embrace the chaotic natural and spiritual world through a rational means.  And the emotional conflict found in the practice of these eight artists creates a charged space of crisis, which in turn opens the opportunity for both artist and viewer to experience an existential or emotional transcendence.   Ultimately, Two Things at the Same Time is a document to existential truth and the importance of crisis as a means to implying the infinite in the everyday.

Raised in a Midwestern amusement park, Jonn Herschend is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the confusion of emotional truth through highly structured formats. His video work, photos and paintings have been exhibited both nationally and internationally,  including the 2007 Stuttgarter Filmwinter Film festival in Stuttgart, Germany; and the 2006 Flaherty Film Seminar at Vassar College in New York.  Within the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives and works, his paintings and videos have been exhibited at Southern Exposure, The Lab, Intersection for the Arts, and the The Pacific Film Archive. He is a co-organizer for the 2007 Deadpan Exchange II Festival in Berlin, Germany and a co-editor and co-founder of the quarterly subscription based art project “The Thing.” 

Jim Gaylord is a Brooklyn-based painter, originally from North Carolina.  He received a BA in film from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and an MFA in painting from the University of California, Berkeley.  He was awarded the Eisner Award in Art Practice and recently received a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Gaylord's work has been exhibited internationally in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo and Germany.

Alex Clausen, a Bay Area native, lives and works in San Francisco.  He received his MFA in Drawing and Painting in 2006 from California College of the Arts after graduating from UC Davis in 2000 with a BA in Physics and Art. Alex recently finished working at the Marin Headlands Art Center as an MFA Studio Awardee.  He has shown work at the Exploratorium, Spanganga Gallery, Works San Jose, Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery (Oregon), the the Rena Bransten Gallery and is part of the de Young Museum collection.

b. 1969, Buffalo, New York. Lives and works in Berkeley, California.

Miriam Dym is an installation artist who delights in inventing alternatives to reasonable, functional things and spaces. She has created stand-ins for things in the apparently real world, such as furniture, maps and plans, and landscapes, and is slowly working on re-inventing everything she finds around her. Her latest work is grouped under the title Garbage-Refuse-Trash-Waste Projects, and includes sculptures and installations made from materials diverted from their path to the dump; photographs and time-lapse animations of garbage rotting; and pencil drawings of enormous, stinky, fictitious garbage piles.

Miriam Dym specializes in frequent changes of address and has lived in perhaps 30 different houses and apartments. She has lived in the Bay Area since 1996, with lengthly interludes in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Paris, New York and Berlin. Dym graduated from Yale in 1990 and has an MFA from Columbia University. She has had solo shows and installations in Los Angeles (POST, Susanne Vielmetter), New York (Brooklyn Museum of Art, Pierogi), and San Francisco, and has work in the permanent collection at SFMOMA and in the Norton Collection.

Melissa Day received her Masters in Fine Art from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Queen's University, Canada and Glasgow School of Art, Scotland in 1992. Her work has been exhibited recently at Super Bien! (Berlin), New Langton Arts (San Francisco), Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum, Peak Gallery (Toronto), Roam Contemporary (New York), the Cologne Online Film Festival, and Photo Miami. Recent awards include the 2005-6 UC Berkeley MFA Studio Award at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Foundation’s Murphy Fellowship in the Fine Arts and the Eisner Prize in the Creative Arts. Day is represented by Peak Gallery, Toronto.

Desirée Arlette Holman is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Oakland, CA.  In 1999, directly after completing her BFA in sculpture at California College of the Arts, Desirée attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.  She graduated with her MFA from UC Berkeley in 2002.  While at UCB, she received Eisner awards in both video and photography.  Her work has generated critical acclaim in multiple reviews and exhibition catalogues.   In 2004, she was a Santa Fe Center for Photography’s Vision Project Competition Winner. In recent years, her work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at YYZ Artist’s Outlet in Toronto, Canada, Chicago’ Lisa Boyle Gallery, San Francisco’s Queens Nails Annex and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. Her work has been exhibited at the L.A. County Museum of Art, San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts & New Langton Arts; the Berkeley Art Museum; UC Davis’ Nelson Gallery & Fine Arts Collection, The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Syracuse University, Los Angeles’ Loyola Marymount University; Milan, Italy’s BnD Studios and Toronto, Ontario’s The Drake. Holman is also an arts educator and has taught at UC Berkeley, St. Mary’s College of California and Diablo Valley College.

Sarah Cain was born in 1979 in Albany, New York, and presently lives and works in Mill Valley, California. Most recently, Cain has had solo exhibitions at Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco; Queens Nails Annex, San Francisco; The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; Lucky Tackle Gallery, Oakland; and The Backroom Gallery at Adobe Books, San Francisco.  She has also been included in group exhibitions at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Busan Biennale, Busan, Korea; The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado; Open Space, Vancouver; The Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley; Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco; The Sickle, Providence, Rhode Island; The Lab, San Francisco; Kunst PLUS, Düsseldorf; and New Image Art, Los Angeles.  Cain is represented in San Francisco by Anthony Meier Fine Arts.

Will Rogan's work has been exhibited at DUMBO Art Center in Brooklyn, the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Florida, Gasworks Gallery in London, and in San Francisco at the Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, the Lab, Jack Hanley Gallery and Southern Exposure. In 2002 Rogan was a recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's SECA award and in 2004 he was awarded a fellowship by the Program for Media Artists. Rogan is represented by the Jack Hanley Gallery, in Los Angeles and San Francisco.