Opening Reception: Saturday, October 10, 6–9 PM
Exhibition Dates: October 10 – November 8, 2026
Good Children Gallery presents two concurrent solo exhibitions: Terry Berlier’s Collecting Amnesias and CAConrad’s
First Light. Presented independently, each exhibition maintains its own conceptual and material identity while creating a dialogue across the gallery spaces. Through sculpture, installation, poetry, ritual, and sound, Berlier and CAConrad approach questions of history, ecology, memory, and transformation through distinctly queer perspectives.
Collecting Amnesias and First Light are materially and formally distinct, yet both challenge inherited structures and consider what becomes possible when familiar histories and ways of understanding the world are disrupted and reoriented.
In Collecting Amnesias, Berlier begins with the strange history of a statue of scientist Louis Agassiz that fell headfirst from Stanford University’s zoology building during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, landing almost perfectly upside down. Berlier uses this accidental inversion to fragment, hollow, and reposition the monumental body, asking what actually changes when a monument comes down and what we continue to carry after it is gone.
In the adjacent gallery, CAConrad’s First Light emerges from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual of observing sunrise, both in person and through live public webcams around the world. Written within the urgency of anthropocenic times, the poems consider the body in relation to ecological change, technology, memory, and those who came before us. Moving beyond the conventional page, CAConrad’s poetry enters the gallery as a physical and sculptural presence.
The curatorial relationship between these two solo exhibitions is rooted in the artists’ shared use of queer practice to question what is assumed to be permanent. Berlier begins with a monument and turns it upside down; CAConrad begins with sunrise, returning to an ancient daily cycle while encountering a rapidly changing world. Across their separate gallery spaces, their work asks what we choose to preserve, what we might relinquish, and what other possibilities become visible when we see from a different perspective.
Curated by Valerie George and presented by 309 Punk Project at Good Children Gallery with major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Terry Berlier is an artist and sculptor whose work addresses environmental and queer concerns through kinetic and sound-based media, video, installation, sculpture, and performance. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia, including at the Marc Chagall National Museum in France, the Museum of Old and New Art in Australia, and EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. She has received numerous residencies and grants, including the Creative Work Fund Grant, Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, Zellerbach Foundation support, California Council for the Humanities California Stories Fund, and a residency at the Millay Colony for Artists in New York. Her work is published in Seeing Gertrude Stein (University of California Press) and Slant Step Book: The Mysterious Object and the Artworks It Inspired. Berlier is Professor of Art and, by courtesy, Professor of Music in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. She has served on the Recology Artist in Residence Advisory Board since 2012, following her residency there.
IG: @berlierthanyou | terryberlier.com
CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their books include The Book of Frank, Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration, You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis, and Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. They received the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and teach at the Sandberg Art Institute and De Ateliers in Amsterdam.
IG: @CAconrad88 | caconrad.com
Valerie George is an artist, curator, and Professor of Art at the University of West Florida. She is co-founder and co-executive director of 309 Punk Project in Pensacola, Florida.
IG: @valerienicolegeorge | valeriegeorgeart.us