Chris Duncan

Last April, East Bay artist Chris Duncan rambled around on our rooftop with a broken ankle, wrapping swaths of plain black fabric around its corners and angles. Five months later he returned to remove the result: a series of sun exposures, ghostly in their stretched folds and faded creases. This process, which he stumbled upon serendipitously years ago, is the product of the powerful passage of time and the effortless natural cycles that inform so much of his work.

When you see Duncan’s Oakland studio, you see functionality, sparseness, and versatility. It’s full of his artwork, and a sense of possibility. It’s also home to the offices of Land & Sea Publishing, a book and record venture sustained by Duncan and his wife, Maria Otero. And in recent months it’s become an event and performance space, morphing into a venue the moment its contents are rearranged.

Duncan’s studio, flexible and ever-adapting, is a fitting home for an artist whose process demands flexibility. After beginning his career as a painter, Duncan is more interested in experimentation. Whether working in sound sculptures, sunlight exposure paintings, or rubbings, continuity is clear. “The repetition of a simple gesture accumulated to a point of transcendence is sort of my platform,” he reflects.

“Every day the sun rises and sets and rises and sets and rises and sets,” he says. To see this piece is to reflect on the natural processes that made it possible.