Both Ways Will Take You There features individual and collaborative works by Sarah Klein and David Kwan, highlighting their interests in experimental animation, visual music, and serial processes across a range of media.

Klein and Kwan share similar approaches to working with set vocabularies of forms, and then altering and combining them to derive many variations and manifestations. The building blocks of their work can start out as line drawings, test tones from electronic devices, or GIFs created on a smartphone. The transformation process can involve coloring, collaging and layering, manipulations in the time domain, or transcoding to another medium.

The monoprints in the exhibition can be read as scenes from a long animation, where elements are constantly in motion and evolving in their composition. Some of the videos are produced by driving test tones into televisions to create visual patterns, and then manipulating the tones and patterns to form chords and clusters. Or the patterns form the basis for a series of monoprints, which in turn are reassembled into an animation.

The 40-plus works of monoprints, animations and sound in this exhibition are a record of the ideas and processes passed between Klein and Kwan. This is a multisensory space where viewers can experience them in an immersive and contemplative way.

David Kwan is a sound and visual artist who produces visual music and intermedia works for installations, screenings and performances. Adapting sounds and imagery from the environment and found sources, he uses combinatorial and iterative approaches to develop forms and to highlight the interplay of light and color.

He has presented at Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts, Exploratorium and Mission 17 in the San Francisco Bay Area; Jack Straw and 4Culture in Seattle; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and CalArts in Los Angeles; Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit; Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb; Festival Tweetakt in Utrecht; General Public in Berlin. He has been awarded residencies at the Experimental Television Center, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Surel’s Place, and Kala Art Institute.

Based in San Francisco, he has taught in art, music and intermedia at Mills College in Oakland, worked for Digidesign/Avid during the nascency of digital audio technology, and produced for media and broadcast. He is co-producer of the Stop & Go animation series.

Sarah Klein is a visual artist, educator and curator based in San Francisco.  Working in animation and printmaking she employs drawing, paper cutouts and live-action footage to create narrative and abstract pieces. Informed by a decade of working in stop-motion, she continues to expand on the language of movement within print-based works. Using image sequences and repeated forms, she creates compositions that highlight the parts that make up the whole.

Among her many honors are residencies at AGA LAB in Amsterdam, NL, Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside, CA; Jentel Artist Residency Program in Banner, WY; McColl Center for the Arts in Charlotte, NC; and the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, WY.

Klein is the co-owner an illustrator of The Local Foods Wheel. She curates the Peephole Cinema in San Francisco, and she is the founder and co-producer of the Stop & Go animation series.