‘Comfort Room’ is a space of grief and growth for this Bay Area Fil-Am artist
Photo from @stanfordarts/Instagram
If you find the Filipino term “comfort room” an interesting choice of words, there’s a Bay Area art show that will make you re-examine its meaning and the space it represents.
In San Francisco-based Filipino-American artist and educator Jenifer K Wofford’s ongoing solo exhibition titled “Comfort Room,” it’s a space that provides a release from grief.
The exhibition, which opened at Stanford University’s Coulter Art Gallery on Sept. 26, is the latest addition to Wofford’s vibrant body of work that investigates hybridity and history.
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“‘Comfort room’ is the term for a toilet in the Philippines. It serves as an amusing euphemism for a place of relief and release,” Wofford says. “My show is not bathroom-focused whatsoever. I’m employing this title to invoke a space for release, relief, grief, imagination, and reinvention.”
It’s fitting then that Wofford opened the show with an emotional performance to honor her late father who passed away while she was working on it.
“Early into the reception, I dropped the needle on one of Al Wofford’s old records, changed into my caftan, crumbled a bunch of saltines into a glass, poured milk in, and ate. And cried. I added some plum jam from the batch I’d made from my parents’ tree the day after Dad died. And ate and cried some more,” Wofford says about the tribute.
“Al Wofford’s late night comfort ritual was saltines in milk, and I really, really wanted him to be there with me yesterday.”
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While Wofford has made it no secret that the show is partly her way of working through personal grief, she clarifies that it doesn’t need to be viewed as her biography.
“I’m generally disinterested in the limitations of this kind of read. It’s enough for visitors to experience it as simply a psychological, emotional, imaginative space. The paintings and other components in this installation can be seen broadly as an attempt to reconcile one’s relationship to life transitions via an imaginative interior place,” she says.
She’s also been developing the idea for the show for years, in a way. “One of my favorite art spaces in Manila was the CR Gallery in the upstairs bathroom of the long gone Mag:net Katipunan space. I’d always hoped to do a bathroom exhibition along similar lines here, so the use of this title is my consolation prize, I suppose,” Wofford adds.
Perhaps her experience in teaching both fine arts and Philippine studies at the University of San Francisco has also worked its way into her canvases.
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Born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, Dubai, Malaysia, and the Bay Area, Jenifer K Wofford takes inspiration from global culture. You can see this in narratives explored in her work that have been exhibited in the Bay Area at the Asian Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, YBCA, San Jose Museum of Art, Southern Exposure, and Kearny Street Workshop.
You can visit “Comfort Room” Coulter Art Gallery Mondays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. until Dec. 8.
