Heavy Batter
Curated by Red Dog Jar Studio
(Lola Reed, Millicent Villacastin, and Saiya Williams)

July 11-August 1, 2026
Open July 11, 5-8pm

An exhibition curated by and celebrating the California College of the Arts Community.

Alex Ehmer, Avery Ardoin, Beth Padilla, Chloe King, Dav1 Task, Efrem Fitch, Gabby Severson, Gabriella Silva Myers Lipton, Jensen Laine, Jorji Cohen, Joseph Blake, Leo Pickard, Lily Crawford, Lola Reed, Lucy Harrington, Millicent Villacastin, Marcus Masaki Rodriquez, Ru Lyons, Sahalie Aurora, Saiya Williams, Taia Wong Konstantindis, Wyatt Elswick, Zedekiah Schild

If evil is banal, is absurdity the ultimate act of good?

Heavy Batter gathers works that embrace the nonsensical, funny, and tragically stupid—gestures that refuse order and legibility. In moments of crisis, how do we cope? Absurdity emerges as a survival mechanism; it is the lens through which we tether parts of our reality that feel incomprehensible, unseeable. Through exaggeration, misplacement, and humor, absurdity disrupts rational systems that demand coherence.

Hannah Arendt’s philosophical concept of the ‘banality of evil’ describes how violence is enacted through obedience rather than flamboyant villainy. It is sanctioned through orders of a corrupt system, so normalized that they no longer feel like choices. When evil is inherent to rigid structures of power, it is the disruptive moments of unpalatable, absurdist rebellion that ground communities in their humanity.

If banality is evil, absurdity is its enemy. To act absurdly is to recognize social expectations and deliberately misperform them. It is a refusal of sense-making structures; absurdity itself is an act of rebellion, a push against hegemonic ideals. Absurdity operates as rebellion through disorientation. By confronting existing systems with the uncanny, it exposes the arbitrary makeup of governing forces.

In times of social and political urgency, what do we say in the face of it all? However we may carry that in our own identities, in the present culture under this regime, in the Bay Area art scene, and as artists trying to get free from worlds of prejudice; coming forward with our absurdities is what pushes against these systems.

In a region historically shaped by countercultural movements and experimental practices, absurdity destabilizes dominant narratives through excess, humor, and misalignment. Heavy Batter proposes absurdity as a pathway toward resistance, completely acknowledging the ways in which dominant structures can be counteracted, yet deliberately veering towards the unknown.

By allowing absurdity to surface as both form and method, the exhibition pushes against regimes of sense-making that sustain exclusion and control, opening space for alternative modes of relation, imagination, and possibility.

-Red Dog Jar Studios

Special thanks to Susan Schroder, CCA graduate and President of Cushion Works, making quality cushions since April 1982 and now sharing space with an art gallery that borrowed its name.