This is our second exhibition at our new Dream Farm Commons annex space: Ricky’s Tribune Barber Shop. The new site to be explored is at 341 15th Street, two doors down from our main galleryspace. Ricky's Tribune Barber Shop was a live barbershop in downtown Oakland for over 50 years; first in the Tribune Building on 13th Street and then later in our building on 15th Street, run by the ever kind, ever diligent Ricky Ramirez of Oakland, who is greatly missed by the street years after his passing.
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and
Other Irrational
Symbols
Quinn Keck
May 31 - July 31, 2025
At Ricky's Tribune Barbershop Annex at Dream Farm Commons,
341 15th Street, Oakland
We inherit our symbolic reality from the moment we first learn to name something. Performers in a play passed down to us that we did not write, yet with every thought we transform the script’s symbols. Someday the symbol’s original forms may no longer be recognizable. Spinning new ontologies with each new idea and new worlds with each symbol, we create the world within our skulls – yet whose world are we creating? Be b
From the moment we first learn to speak, we inherit a script we did not choose with its words, symbols wand equations so deeply embedded in our worldview we might not even see them. Freud and Jung’s psychoanalytic theories are foundational to how the human mind is seen from European and American perspectives: both men were inspired by the recent advancements in quantum mechanics to develop their theories. If you have had the privilege of seeing a therapist in the United States, Freud and Jung’s work shapes how that therapist has been taught to see your mind by the institutions that credentialed them.
It can be tempting to imagine our skulls to be like the walls of the gallery – blank canvases to house our autonomous creations. Like the gallery wall and Plato’s cave, our minds have a circumstance that determines possible interpretations of shadows on the wall, obscuring the questions we do not ask. Are we discovering an ideal world of forms or a product of our times incapable of conceiving a world existing outside of dualism? All models are wrong, some are useful. The most dangerous model is imaginingg that you do not have one, for what is default was never neutral. How can you amend a model we can not see?
In the spirit of investigating what ideas are embedded in our various ways of thinking, there will be an opportunity to write down any symbols, sigils, words, and equations that have allowed you to think in new ways, especially if that process was not linear. If you are someone who likes to plan ahead, you can start contemplating these now or just show up and see if anything comes to you. In addition to the equations etched into my mind cut out on blind embossed Rives BFK and the shadows they create, there will be small pies, color changing beverages and conversations to be had. Join us for the opening:
Saturday, May 31st 4-6 pm
Annex of Dream Farm Commons, 3 doors down
(341 15th St, Oakland)