This past July and August, Alejandro Almanza Pereda’s solo exhibition “Everything but the Kitchen Sank” at SFAI’s Walter and McBean Galleries presented a studio in which visitors could witness the creation of photographs and a video of subaqueous still lifes shot inside a eight-foot-tall Kevlar pool. The resulting pictures feature a plethora of found objects and offer ephemeral and preposterous arrangements that experiment with the behavior of materials underwater. Take, for example, the theatrical video Like Steaks and Salads, 2015, which is divided into a series of acts where different items—such as matches, candles, plates, and flowers—are manipulated underwater. Almanza orchestrates unexpected movements: Some objects float and others sink, moving faster or slower depending on their buoyancy. Among the Mexican artist’s captivating photographic works is Taking the Lid Off, 2015, is an elegant but absurd image that shows a pair of fruit bowls and a vase holding a blooming artichoke; some elements are inverted, defying the natural order of things. In all, Almanza’s constructions result in dreamy, counterbalancing compositions that trickily transform the quotidian into the surreal.

Concurrently, at the institution’s Diego Rivera Gallery, visitors can see two scaffolds: one depicted in Rivera’s descriptively titled mural The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, 1931, which shows Rivera, engineers, and more laborers working on the reconstruction of San Francisco. Placed directly in front this, Almanza’s large scaffolding of fluorescent tubes, Change the World or Go Home, 2009–15, challenges the iconic mural and illuminates the ambivalent nature of progress and expansion, perhaps as a reference to contemporary art itself.

— Claudia Arozqueta