After scouring studios, screening rooms and performance venues, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts holds a mirror up to the Bay Area's ever-vibrant art scene and puts the reflection on display in their triennial exhibit, Bay Area Now. This ambitious four-month-long survey of the region's artistic landscape provides an expansive look at the area's cutting edge of visual and performing arts and film.

Now in its fifth rendering, BAN5 explores the Bay Area and its artistic denizens from the inside out by focusing on the experience of being simultaneously local and global citizens.

The YBCA's acting director of visual arts Kate Eilersten and fellow associate visual arts curator Berin Golonu gleaned 12 artists from an extensive search of 80 studios whose diverse works come together in an exuberant and striking collection that varies wildly in subject and form.

"We wanted to have it be an exhibition that was not about little boxes separating everybody's work," Eilersten said, "Instead of everybody having their own stall, we wanted it to be a more free-flowing aesthetic."

Heavily emphasizing three-dimensional works, the bulk of the exhibition is an array of sculptures and installations that range from the curious to the eerie. Joshua Churchill's chilling light/sound installation "Fathom" stands out as the exhibit's most gripping piece. Churchill manages to capture with unsettling precision the ever-present threat of chaos that lurks just beneath the veneer of our constructed realities. In the gallery just next door, though, you'll find Misako Inaoka's whimsical installation "Urban Habitat Re-Creation," which requires viewers to crawl on all fours.

With an array of works of such startling variety, BAN5's visual arts component is most effective in its more modest goal of showcasing how the brightest and freshest Bay Area minds-both emerging and established-are challenging their particular media of expression rather than in its meditation on globalization.

The free-flowing aesthetic that the exhibition hopes to convey is most exemplified by "Ground Scores," a series of tours which eschew the physical boundaries of YBCA altogether. Guest-curated by Valerie Imus, "Ground Scores" connects in-gallery multimedia installations with intriguingly unconventional tours of San Francisco's storied urban landscape, expanding the scope of BAN5 to the urban environment itself. The city thus becomes re-envisioned as its own complex work of art rather than just a site of creation.

As a multidisciplinary festival, BAN5 also includes a film component just as diverse. In contrast to past BAN film programs, film curator Joel Shepard commissioned screenings from six hand-selected guest curators to provide one-of-a-kind programming.

"What I try to do here is provide something completely unique," Shepard explained, "I have a bold curatorial aesthetic that I really want to continually challenge and surprise people."

Upcoming programs are inspired by everything from deep personal obsession (Jesse Hawthorne Ficks' showcase of ultra-rare '80s films, including one that is being flown in from the British Art Institute) to social justice advocacy (Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project's screenings of films spawned from their workshops with under served communities). While the subject matter of the screenings runs the gamut from the personal to the political, each is characterized by a vanguard unconventionality that Shepard feels is simply part and parcel of the Bay Area.

"There's an adventurous kind of maverick spirit here ... There's a different type of energy and people will take risks in what they are doing," Shepard said of the region's cinema culture, "It's really just like the city in general."

In this sense, BAN5 can be best understood as a distillation of the celebrated diversity that gives the Bay Area its distinct flavor.

Tags: YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS