Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Live Like Him! a video installation by Molly Corey. The installation centers around a poignant audio monologue of a man recalling the moment he fell in love with a member of the Weather Underground, the radical Leftist organization, to whom he offered sanctuary in 1969.  This tale of love, loss and revolutionary politics is juxtaposed with sweeping filmic images of the carved faces of the revolutionary figures that line the "Great Western Staircase" of New York's capital building, where the two men met for the last time.  At once lyrical and biting, Corey's project continues Roland Barthes' thesis that love indeed can be a "medium of critique" in politically turbulent times. Curated by Juli Carson. Read Brochure | View Images

Steven Criqui (1964-2007), lecturer in the Studio Arts department from 1995-2006, will be remembered in a survey exhibition at the University Art Gallery from January 10th thru February 9th, 2008. The exhibition will span over 20 years of Criqui's practice from early whimsical biomorphic abstractions through his innovative fusion of digital media and painting. His final body of work, which realizes his vision in its most seamless form, will be exhibited here for the first time. View Images

The University Art Gallery at UC Irvine launches its Major Work of Art Series with the California premiere of Mary Kelly's famed Circa 1968, originally shown in the Whitney Biennial of 2004. Circa 1968 employs appropriated imagery from the May 68 demonstrations in Paris to question memory and history and the related concept of truth.  Biennial curator Debra Singer describes the work: "Made of lint generated from doing thousands of pounds of laundry, Circa 1968 plays off of different associations among the photographic, the painterly, and the cinematic image." Mary Kelly is a world-renowned artist, living in Los Angeles. She currently has a retrospective at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. Read Brochure | View Images

Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Chilean artist Cristóbal Lehyt's installation piece Reduced to Insults. This multi-media exhibition posits the concept of fatalism (or defeatism) as a strategic mode of resistance within the global geo-political sphere. Employing drawing, video and sculpture, Lehyt's work combines political content with poetic aesthetics to comment specifically on the Southern California / Mexican border dialogue as an allegory for larger cultural issues pertaining to the "Global South."
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Paradox and Practice: Architecture in the Wake of Conceptualism re-thinks the legacy of Conceptualism vis-á-vis the philosophical operation of paradox. Specifically, the notion of "site," as it exists between art and architecture, is reconsidered. Thinking about paradox and conceptualism is no formal exercise; it is a political imperative. Take, for example, the infamous Torture Memo, drafted by Alberto Gonzalez, in which any paradoxical notion of a "state of statelessness" was denied. Within such logic, the Geneva Convention could be dismissed as "irrelevant" to those lacking clear national status. In this cultural context, the curators of Paradox and Practice argue the progressiveness of thinking non-dialectically as an aesthetic and political act. This exhibition brings together practitioners whose work lies at the nexus of architecture and conceptual art. Congregating along this boundary, the artists interrogate conventions of site-specificity, functionality and material presence; and in so doing, complex propositions related to nationalism, identity, and public space are posited. Curated by Juli Carson and Nana Last.

UCI's Room Gallery continues its film screening series with The Pursuit of Silence, curated by Adrià Julià. The ad hoc film series starts with Elie Wiesel's assertion that silence has its own bone structure, its own labyrinths and its own contradictions - the assassin's silence being neither the victim's nor the spectator's. In all 14 films, silence plays a leading role. Each director introduces the artificial presence or absence of silence to reveal an emotional structure and authority of cinema. Screening schedule...