RECEPTION TONIGHT,

6-8:30pm - note extended time

4/12/07 (Free)

SF LGBT Center Gallery - 3rd Floor

1800 Market Street, San Francisco, CA

Exhibition will be up through April, 2007

Call Visual Aid at 415-777-8242 for more info.

Join us this evening for a wine & cheese reception and meet some of the many artists whose work is included in GET OUT OF JAIL FREE.

This provocative exhibition examines the compelling theme of imprisonment as a metaphor for illness and other complex issues of struggle, oppression and inequities in power relationships in political, social, environmental and personal arenas. To give a broader voice to this discussion, the call for entries was opened to the public and traveled around the globe. Entries were accepted in the form of digital files, in an effort to make the exhibition more inclusive and accessible. As a result, digital reproductions are included in the exhibition, along with original works of art.

Visual Aid received a tremendous response, with over a hundred artists (including graffiti artists, numerous prisoners and prison rights groups along with national and international artists) joining Visual Aid artists to create a nuanced dialogue around the central issues of illness, disenfranchisement, alienation, and injustice.

In the Monopoly game we played as kids, a lucky roll of the dice assigned the Get Out of Jail Free card to one player. The card, which functioned as a pass, was used to instantly extricate the player from dire circumstances. The theme of the exhibition was inspired when members of the Visual Aid Exhibition Team noticed the Get Out of Jail Free card cropping up repeatedly in diverse works of art. In this exhibition, the title references how--in our darkest hour--we may begin to rely on magical thinking to try and shield ourselves from trouble. We might wish for a charm or envision a threshold we can step through to a parallel universe without illness or homophobia, racist wars or environmental degradation.

GET OUT OF JAIL FREE was curated by the Visual Aid Exhibition Team. The exhibition features 170 small digital prints, photographs, collages, paintings, drawings, prints, mixed media works and sculpture from the Visual Aid community and national and international artists.