'Chance Operations': Show about uncertain times

With the election just around the corner and the stock market rising and falling dramatically every day, it would seem that we're living in dicey times. The six Climate Theater curators, led by Victoria Heilweil and experimental film series ("Night Vision") director Jen Cohen, anticipated a bumpy fall while planning a one-night-only art show called "Chance Operations."

"Things are very uncertain and unstable. The idea that there are things that are based on chance rather than set in stone is more of our reality," says Heilweil, Climate's main visual arts curator. "This theme was really timely. It's how we were feeling about the current political state."

The group found the 15 artists in the show through an open call and targeted invitations. This is the second art event put on by the Climate Theater group, which came out of meetings between Heilweil and Cohen earlier this year - each organizes visual and film works for Climate, and they wanted to collaborate.

"We really are interested in a wide variety of mediums," Heilweil says. "The space at Climate is well suited to installations and less traditional pieces, and the mission of Climate is to give experimental work a space."

For "Chance Operations," five artists elected to do interactive projects; most have some multidisciplinary component to them. There is a mix of sculpture, photography, video, dance and other kinds of live performance.

The theme is worked out in various ways in the show. Some artists, like Kirkman Amyx, translate chance directly into rolling dice - he does a graph on the probabilities of numbers coming up - and others find a more indirect way of tackling the subject. Niki Shapiro, for instance, contributes an installation made from junk mail sorted for color and rolled together into sheets. The randomness comes in what ends up on the surface of the sheets.

Only one artist, Victor Cartagena, deals explicitly with the politics of chance. "He is doing a piece that is somewhat humorous," Heilweil says, "featuring George W. Bush. It's a video with a sculptural project." For an interactive element, Heilweil says, "he's making a big clown nose that people can grab at."

8 p.m. Sat. $10. Climate Theater, 285 Ninth St., S.F. www.climatetheater.com.

This article appeared on page G - 19 of the San Francisco Chronicle