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The University Art Gallery
Room Gallery CHOPSHOP Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Stephanie Taylor's Chop Shop. A "site-specific" installation of sculpture, photography, and song, Chop Shop presents objects, images, and sounds derived from a rhyme schema based on the word "Room." Conceived in a Surrealist vein, the "rhyming" objects are at once bizarre and compelling. Lyrical connections, between such disparate activities as car theft and art theft, evoke questions concerning the relationship between politics and aesthetics within the legacy of site-specific art practice. Curated by Juli Carson, the exhibition is accompanied by a brochure and interview. Chop Shop travels to Galerie Nagel in Berlin this year.  FALLAYAVADA The centerpiece of FALLAYAVADA: Bahc Yiso Project and Tribute exhibition is the world premier of Fallayavada, a project that the artist had conceptualized with detailed notes but never realized. Fallayavada is a mixed media installation composed of an oval-shaped coliseum-like structure upon which viewers sit and view a video projection on the floor. The projection consists of images of what Bahc called “vertical landscapes-vertical flow of time and space” captured from a video camera dropped from a plane. Bahc Yiso was one of the most recognized Korean artists of the 90s’ whose life was cut short in 2004. His extensive exhibition record includes Gwangju Biennale (1997 and 2002), Taipei Biennial (1998), Yokohama Triennial (2001), Venice Biennale (2003 and 2005) and the San Diego Museum of Art (2004). A Bahc Yiso retrospective will be held at Samsung’s Rodin Museum in Seoul next year. FALLAYAVADA exhibition is organized by Yong Soon Min in collaboration with Jung Hunyee and Lee Young Chul and is co-sponsored by Korean Cultural Center and Andrew Shire Gallery, both located in Los Angeles. A catalog published by UCI University Art Gallery will accompany the exhibition.  Greenhouse Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Sam Watters’ Greenhouse. Tugging at the boundaries between conceptual and pictorial art traditions, Watters’ masterfully rendered watercolors collectively represent the palindrome “Live not on evil” in topiary form. Simultaneously (and incongruously) Watters’ references the conceptualist legacies of Ed Ruscha and the pictorial legacy of botanical drawing. The work is more than mere aesthetic play, however, as such recently charged issues as human cloning, the war in Iraq, and the greenhouse effect lie just beneath the surface in a series of critical, visual puns. Curated by Juli Carson, the exhibition is accompanied by a brochure and essay.  Lover's Discourse Film Series The figure refers, not to what the human solitude of the amorous subject may be, but to his “philosophical” solitude, love-as-passion being accounted for today by no major system of thought (or discourse). – Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse Room Gallery hosts Lover’s Discourse Film Series, curated by Juli Carson. This series is an ad hoc screening of films embodying Roland Barthes’ assertion that love could be a critical “medium” in politically turbulent times. In all 20 films, the love story is the vehicle for the actual subject matter: a paradigmatic historical event. Each director takes up this allegorical operation in different ways to interrogate film as a critical agent for social change.  Disappeared in America Disappeared in America, a traveling exhibition that premiered at the Queens Museum of Art in New York, begins its west coast tour here at UCI. Created by Naeem Mohaiem, Director of VISIBLE, a Collective of Muslim and Other Artists, Disappeared is a walk-through installation that uses film, soundscape, images, installations and lectures to humanize the faces of post 9/11 "disappeared" Muslims. Excerpts and lectures from Disappeared have been shown in Stuttgart (with Walid Raad/Atlas Group), London (with Otolith Group), Berlin (KunstWerke with Natasa Petresin), New York (Queens Museum of Art; Brecht Forum; South Street Seaport; Cooper Union), Stockholm (Finnish Embassy), Karlskrona (Military Museum), Belgrade and Helsinki (Kiasma Museum). It is showing next in Lebannon and Liverpool (FACT: Foundation for Art & Creative Technology). |