Yerba Buena / Moscone Center Muni Station
This piece, found at the Yerba Buena/Moscone Center Muni station is by Leslie Shows, a Los Angeles-based artist whose mixed-media works incorporate assemblage, painting, drawing, glass, and sculptural relief. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art.
According to the artist: “All my work is quite layered in the associations and different registers of meaning. ‘Face C/Z’ is like a threshold to a tunnel in a certain way, but it’s also incorporating all the materials of the station itself: the glass and the steel, and even the light, kind of amplifying it. There’s a transformative thing too: It’s like an Earth image, but it also reminds me of the ocean from certain angles or the sky. It was interesting to see that kind of unfold as I was making it. Working on something at that scale was a really special experience. I worked with the glass studio at Oakland Lenehan Architectural Glass and we decided early on that it had to be hand-made by me to do what I wanted it to do. I spent a long time with them working on the engineering, and then when it came time to fabricate it, I learned to use these vitreous enamel paints, which is this really ancient material process for painting on glass. It was like making 35 giant glass paintings and each one is a little like a landscape within itself. I think about people who might be using the station regularly and hopefully, they’ll see something different every time they come, depending on what the light is doing.”