Joshua-Michele Ross and Hope Meng: To Be Among Friends
April 5 – August 10, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 5 from 7-10PM
During the virtual performance The Adjacent Possible, which ran at the height of the pandemic, artist Joshua Michele Ross opened by collecting participants’ desires. Ross then recited them back at the end of the show, closing with a sense of community and hope. These desires—representing over 900 statements from 35 countries—ranged from funny to sad, everyday to deeply poignant.
Now, in collaboration with artist Hope Meng, this project transforms these desires into an immersive time capsule, set within the confines of an elevator.
As one enters, they are greeted by an ambient, unfolding soundtrack beneath a slow recitation of each desire. The looped audio is approximately three hours long, ensuring a unique experience each time one enters the elevator. Quilted fabric lines the walls, featuring text of desires from participants around the world. Riders are drawn into a warm cocoon filled with sentiments from a paradoxical time when we felt togetherness in our isolation and new possibility amidst tragedy.
An elevator, like the pandemic, represents a transitional space—a vehicle taking us from the known past into an ambiguous new future—while the enclosed space mirrors the state of lockdown.
To Be Among Friends creates a site of remembrance and a collective prayer for possibility, togetherness, and the exaltation of simple pleasures.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Hope Meng (b. 1977) is a San Francisco-based artist whose work exists at the unlikely junction of typography and textiles. Hope creates sewn fabric compositions using a typographic system that she developed, based on the visual language of American quilt patterns. Hope has exhibited at several galleries and museum shows, including Hella Feminist at Oakland Museum of California, the Berkeley Art Museum, and Scalehouse Gallery in Bend, OR. Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Oakland Museum of California. She has a BFA in Graphic Design from California College of the Arts (2007) and a BA in Economics from UC Berkeley (1998).
Joshua-Michele Ross (b. 1967) is a conceptual and sound-based artist whose work centers on time, ecology, and the restorative power of listening. In response to a visually-dominated world, he uses listening as a disarming medium for revelation, enchantment, and increased connection with the more-than-human world. Ross has exhibited in the U.S. and abroad including Mengi (Reykjavik, Iceland), The Bo Bartlett Center, Grand Central Art Center, and Pasaquan – a visionary art environment in Buena Vista, Georgia.