Multidisciplinary artist and musician Chris Sollars, working within an anti-capitalist frame, Sollars takes to the streets and landscape in order to have immediate interaction with a public audience and to collect society's detritus, trash, and artifacts for sculptures. His process, physical as well as conceptual, collides dissimilar materials to create unexpected and derisory forms, while commenting on larger societal issues. The documentation of these actions through photography, sound, and video, creates the basis for installations that are often absurd and comedic.
Awards include 2022 MacDowell Fellowship, 2022 Ucross Foundation Residency, 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2021 Gate 27 Istanbul Residency, Recology Artist in Residence, San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Grant, and Headlands Center for the Arts residency. Sollars has exhibited and performed solo and collaborative works in venues nationally and internationally, including SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Parisian Laundry; Montreal, Quebec, The New Children's Museum, San Diego; Berkeley Art Museum; Creative Time New York at the Park Armory; Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, Southern Exposure, Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Tokyo; the Aurlander International Airport, Stockholm, Sweden, and on the streets of cities and in remote landscapes.
Recent Exhibitions include Chris Sollars: SF 1999-2024 a survey of his works inspired by and made within the streets of San Francisco from 1999 and works formulated and sometimes embedded in the walls of this house 667 Shotwell an experimental project space in his home he ran for eleven years. Since 2017 Sollars' attention has turned to the sonic and percussive qualities of materials, building instruments from debris and trash and starting music projects as artworks. These solo and collaborative projects are presented as LPs released through his label Object Records, music videos, and live performances in both traditional music venues as well as generator-powered shows.