Life Frames (at the edge of the world)

Zekarias Musele Thompson

Lives and works in Oakland, CA and Reykjavík, IS

Bio & Statement
CV
Email
Instagram

Exhibitions & Projects

2026
2025
2024
2023

return to home

Life Frames (at the edge of the world) #0

site conditioned performance at the Sutro Baths Cave, San Francisco, CA
March 8th, 2026

durational performance, oil on wood panel in plein air, ambient sounds
~ 5 hours

Life Frames (at the edge of the world) is an ongoing series of durational paintings made outdoors at specific sites, in public. The first iteration took place at the cave at Sutro Baths in San Francisco on March 8, 2026, from 3:00 PM until 8:00 pm. People passed through the cave throughout the day. Some had been told the painting was happening and came to see it; most were visiting the site for their own reasons. Some stopped to talk; some looked at the painting; some looked at the hole in the cliff opening onto an inaccessible beach, which is what the painting was looking at.

The project takes its name from the artist Bonnie Ora Sherk, who used life frames to name the physical and conceptual spaces of interconnected life processes: the human, the animal, the landscape, and the various perspectives of observers and technologies that move through them. The cave at Sutro Baths sits between Plato's allegory at one end of Eurocentric thought and the western edge of Manifest Destiny at the other. The cave is the first of several sites planned along the Pacific edge, through Land's End and toward the Fort Barry nestled in the Marin Headlands

photography stills by Ethan Goldwater and