Michael Zahn, Police and Thieves, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches

May 14 – June 6, 2009

“To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention. . .and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and. . .oh, there are loads of rules.” — High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

Crossing genres, blending generations and connecting the emotional dots, My Certain Fate, a group show curated by Timothy Buckwalter at Pharmaka.

Bay area artist Timothy Buckwalter made his first mix tape in 1979 while staying up late trying to record Pink Floyd’s runaway hit song “Another Brick In The Wall, Part One.” The 45RPM had been sold out at his local record store for weeks. Lying on the floor with his RadioShack portable cassette player – its microphone jammed against his clock radio’s speaker – waiting for Pink Floyd to come on, Buckwalter realized that he could go beyond recording that one contemporary song of rebellion. He was soon jotting onto tape anything that evening that seemed connected to that song: Blondie’s Heart of Glass, Billy Joel’s My Life, M’s Popmuzik, The Knack’s My Sharona, Herb Alpert’s Rise and Don’t Bring Me Down from ELO.

Combining photography, painting, sculpture and text-based works in My Certain Fate, Buckwalter has crafted an exhibition that mimics the dynamic behind the mix tape – a genre he believed that evening he had invented but which is in fact a popular element within youth culture. Since the mid-70s the creation of a mix tape has been seen as an expression of the individual compiler’s taste in music. And, of course, as a gift, it has often been put forward as a tentative move toward creating some kind of emotional relationship with the tape’s recipient.

Featuring more than 65 works from 28 U.S. and international artists, My Certain Fate explores and connects the feelings emoting from each piece to create an overarching narrative. Bubbling to the surface of a photo is a mysterious tale of yearning and denial. A drawing begins to crack under the weight of its own smugness. A crisp Miminalist painting offers a space to breathe, a break in the mix. Lurking beneath a sculpture is a less than obvious tale of redemption. The title for the exhibition is excerpted from one of Buckwalter’s favorite songs, “That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate” on Mission of Burma’s 1982 album “Vs. “ – a track that exudes a boatload of melancholia mixed with the possibility for love through self-sacrifice.

Included in the mix are works from John Altoon, Angela Baker, Val Britton, Martin Bromirksi, Manuel Dominguez Jr., Bill Dunlap, Sacha Eckes, Sylvia Fragoso, Tammy Harper, Kevin Parks Hauser, Jeffrey Cortland Jones, Michelle Lewis-King, Joe Macca, Michael Macfeat, Rob Matthews, Mike Monteiro, Marlon Mullen, Christopher Saunders, Jen Siska, Dean Smith, Brian Stechschulte, Katy Stone, Rebecca Whipple, Billy White, Jim Winters, Douglas Witmer, Michael Zahn, and Nina Zurier.

A catalog — with an essay by DJ and blogger Heidi De Vries, poetry by Suzanne Stein, and a Q&A between the curator and painter Michael Zahn – will accompany the show. Included will be a mix CD (playing during the show).