Telematic

SF Art Galleries - Openings & Events Event source calendar Event Link: see venue calendar above ^^ Raindrops on Roses A Mixtape for Telematic Tommy Becker November 14th - January 23rd, 2026 Opening reception: Saturday, November 14th, 6 – 9 Closing reception: Saturday, January 23rd, 2 – 4 In Conversation: Saturday, December 12th, 2 – 4 Featuring Artist Tommy Becker and Curator Clark Buckner Co-presented by Canyon Cinema Exhibition Page Short Statement (60 Words) Raindrops on Roses: A Mixtape for Telematic is an intermedia video installation by experimental filmmaker Tommy Becker, comprised of collections of his “favorite things.” Halloween masks and trading cards, handmade props and paintings, film and television clips. The show explores how we sustain ourselves and our relationships with one another by collectively cultivating and creatively communicating the things we love. Full Statement (492 Words) Raindrops on Roses: A Mixtape for Telematic is an intermedia video installation by experimental filmmaker Tommy Becker, comprised of collections of his “favorite things.” Halloween masks and trading cards, handmade props and paintings, film and television clips. As a love letter and a gift, composed with Becker’s unique blend of original poetry, songs, and cinema, the show explores how we sustain ourselves and our relationships with one another by collectively cultivating and creatively communicating the things we love. At stake in the show is the social nature of media, the ways in which “social media” paradoxically undermines this congeniality, and how a hands on approach to creative practice - and experimental filmmaking in particular - might contribute to restoring our capacity for compassionate connection. Modern media have provided people around the world with the means of actively communicating with one another, sharing images and ideas across great geographical and cultural divides. Owned and operated by a handful of corporate conglomerates, however, they simultaneously have captured and instrumentalized the loving attention that inspires and sustains this social exchange, coercively manipulating our anxious need for connection - largely for the sake of selling advertising - by harnessing and promoting our most anti-social tendencies: fear, anger, hate. In his work, Becker develops and imparts an antidote to this dilemma, presenting a media practice aimed at fostering rather than exploiting our capacity for meaningful social connection, rooted in the conviction that articulating our hopes and dreams and sharing them with one another is essential to sustaining our life together. As a High School art teacher for twenty years, his work is an education in the edifying power of aesthetic play and its essential role in cultivating community. Rather than coercing his audience’s attention, he engages them in an open-ended dialogue, inviting their reflections on the odd juxtaposition of images and artifacts that comprise his films and empowering them - through his D.I.Y. art practice - to conjure their own creative juxtapositions. He presents experimental filmmaking as the exploration of diverse, alternative forms of socializing, sharing likes and dislikes in and in response to new and unexpected creations. In so doing, he simultaneously foregrounds the embodied, material nature of meaningful social connections with particular attention in this show to the role of the hand in self-expression and social commerce. In response to the nihilism of modern media, Becker summons his audience with a call to action, “Let’s make a movie together!,” challenging us to unplug from systems that hold us enthralled to coercive ends, to actively resist the stultifying conditions of the status quo, and to refuse the reduction of identity to alienating bureaucratic categories. Instead, as a quiet but nonetheless potent politics, he calls us to recognize the need for meaningful connection as fundamental to our being, rooted in the universal fragility…