Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, installation, social practice, activism
Website: tacticalmagic.org
Aaron Gach is a native of the Bay Area and has lived and worked in Oakland for most of his career. He received his MFA from the California College of the Arts, where he later taught courses in public art, street media, and art and magic. Before graduate school he undertook an unconventional self-directed education: studying with a private investigator, a magician, and a ninja — three figures whose relationship to power, concealment, and knowledge became the conceptual foundation of his practice. In 2000, he co-founded the Center for Tactical Magic (CTM), an Oakland-based international activist art collective dedicated to the fusion of art, magic, and social change. Early collaborators included Trevor Paglen and Nato Thompson.
He has taught at UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of the Arts, and has been a Granada Artist-in-Residence at UC Davis. His work has been presented by SFMOMA, MASS MoCA, the Hayward Gallery in London, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo, Spain, Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Creative Time in New York, and at institutions in Belgium, Canada, and across the United States. He is a recipient of an Artadia Award and has been featured in Artforum and artnet News.
Gach's practice — conducted primarily through the Center for Tactical Magic — operates at the intersection of art, activism, magic, and what he calls "tactical knowledge": the specialized expertise of investigators, hypnotists, engineers, radical ecologists, former bank robbers, military intelligence officers, and community organizers, all of whom have been collaborators on CTM projects. His core inquiry is into power — how it is exercised, concealed, and potentially redistributed — approached through the metaphor and practice of magic. His equation "power equals secret pocket" drives much of the work: the pocket as a void that can be emptied and refilled, known to its holder but not to others.
His projects take the form of functional vehicles, wearable garments, sculptural installations, performance, and public intervention. They are often participatory, offering visitors an experience — free ice cream, a key, a swing — that is simultaneously pleasurable and politically charged. His work has twice attracted the attention of federal authorities: he was detained and questioned for ninety minutes by US Customs and Border Patrol upon returning from an exhibition in Belgium, an experience he documented publicly as a reference for other artists facing similar scrutiny.
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