Kevin Cohya Valor: Drooling Corner @ Cushion Works

Cushion Works is pleased to present an exhibition of recent photographs by Kevin Cohya Valor (b. 1992, Kumamoto, Japan). Valor’s prolific practice factors the rich and fetid sights of city life into modestly megapixeled files, printed primarily in slick Walgreens gloss. His near infinity of noticing captures the provisional, pathetic, and discarded with an uncommon tenderness, humor, and regard. Based in San Francisco since 2006, Valor is the city’s last great street photographer; not in the tradition of the decisive moment, but rather in the spirit of poet as artist, a drooler in the main.

Valor is in love with the world and its leftovers, and his photographs—teetering between composition and decomposition—are rendered at odd angles, in curious crops, and in various states of focus. Against the backdrop of San Francisco in the 21st century, Valor is preoccupied not with the pageant of capital, but with the remains of the day and night, and the steady flow of citizens and consumption.

The artist displays an almost pathological commitment to a level playing field of images, each with equal weight and import. All of it belongs: the blurry meatball, rotting pineapple, orange abandoned at the intersection. The fallen dessert, still scrumptious, creamy. Sad civic plants surviving an age of drought. Valor narrates the familiar textures and patterns of the city—the cardboard boxes, broken glass, overhead wires, bike racks, and construction sites—with eyes that haven’t learned to look away, as if seeing were still a surprise. Amid everything, the artist returns to people. People on buses, in cafes, on street corners. People coming and going, eating, stretching, driving, using walkers. People caught from the side and from behind, obscured by poles and scarves, sitting in their cars, people eating chicken with their fingers. The city is lucky to have an artist this attentive to its aliveness and remains.

Drooling Corner is presented as an installation, and in abundance.

Kevin Cohya Valor attended the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts. He lives in San Francisco.