The Claire Trevor School of the Arts at UC Irvine presents the 2011 Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibitions in Studio Art. The two-part series features ten individual projects representing three years of formal and theoretical study at the university. Exhibited works encompass painting, drawing, installation, multi-media, performance, video, sculpture, and photography.

 

Part I features: Maura Brewer, Sophie Lee, Amir Nikravan, C. Ree and Samira Yamin

Part II features: Joshua Cho, Adrian de la Peña, Alexis Disselkoen, Noritaka Minami and Marcus Perez

The seventh annual juried undergraduate exhibition,The Natural Number After 8 Preceding 10, showcases the richly varied subject matter of UCI's undergraduate student artists. Using various visual media, the artists explore and question topics such as politics, popular culture, and art historic movements Curated by Mara Lonner.

Featured artists: Matthew Arambulo, Corinne Chan, Noe Gaytan, JoAnn Do Hockersmith, Daniel Kim, Mitchell Klein, Stephanie Li,
Melissa Maldonado, and Janice Miyagi

The UCI Studio Art Program invites you to Ne Me Quitte Pas featuring the work of our second year MFA students: View Images 
 
Featured artists: Nick Aguayo, James Anderson, Sarah Beadle, Maya Gurantz, Flora Kao, Scott Klinger, Lauren Merage, Paul Pescador, and Aaron Valenzuela
 
Opening reception performance by Maya Gurantz

Cult of the Ruin: Strategies of Accumulation features 12 emerging artists from the U.S. and Europe working in video, performance, sculpture, installation, watercolor and food. What binds these disparate projects is the persistence of appropriation, re-enactment, material accretion – as strategies – to address the perceived gap between records of the past and our present experiences.  Over 20 years have passed since critic Craig Owens posited this gap as a site for allegory.  In doing so, Owens defined a branch of postmodern art practice by the artist’s allegorical “impulse” to return to outmoded forms and systems – or ruins – to reinvigorate their contemporary value.  Taken together, the works in this exhibition evince contemporary deviations from his original theory.  And yet, their re-making of Owens’ allegorical impulse keeps the original theory alive. Read Review | View Images | Download Brochure

Featured artists: Miles Ake, Katie Ammons, Ping-Hsiang Chen, Giulio Frigo, Tatiana Istomina, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly, Leigh Ledare, Marilyn Lowey, Ash Eliza Smith, Nico Vascellari, Jesse Wine and David Wojnarowicz

Curated by: Sarah Beadle, Meredith Goldsmith, Flora Kao, Scott Klinger, Lauren Merage and Aaron Valenzuela

Opening night performance by notch
Closing night performance by Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly

UAG / Room Gallery continues its Critical Aesthetics Program, with Andrea Geyer's Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb.  Coined the “Architect of the Holocaust,” Adolf Eichmann’s death sentence was executed on May 31, 1962 after his historic trial in a Jerusalem Court. Over the course of this trial, the courtroom in Jerusalem became a worldwide stage for a multitude of struggles for justice, truth, history and the sovereignty of a young nation.  The Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about these trials and later published her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” a volume that infamously posited the philosophical paradox: the banality of evil.  Some 40 years later, the mid-career German artist Andrea Geyer has conceived an artwork related to these trials called: Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb, which the UAG will mount in Fall, 2010.  Across 6 monitors arranged in a circle around the viewers, this work shows an abstracted trial set in an archive, featuring six characters: Accused, Defense, Judge, Prosecution, Reporter, Audience.  Based on the transcripts of the actual trial as well as the writings of Hannah Arendt, the characters re-enact not so much the trial but its historical trace in the present.  An acknowledgment of history's force as repetition, Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb thus asks us to address our responsibility for this history today.  Curated by Juli Carson
Read Brochure | Read Review | View Images

Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Erika Vogt’s interdisciplinary installation, Secret Traveler Navigator, which premiered at the 2010 Whitney Biennial.  The work’s main component is a film that blurs the boundaries between what Peter Wollen designated as the narrative and structuralist historical avant-gardes.  In so doing, the work begs the question: what is a narrative?  And, by extension, what is a journey?   Structurally, the film is an episodic narrative, wherein different scenes repeat similar abstract images or specific activities, while metaphorically it is also an abstract representation of a compass that’s been broken down into parts.  After the viewer has navigated their journey through these abstract and real signs, a voiceover is heard: The narrator, a man of shimmering devices, has lost his way.  To go back or forward?  Obtuse in storyline but hypnotic in visual affect, Vogt’s Secret Traveler Navigator is a mediation on what Hollis Frampton asked at the height of 60’s experimental film: What are the irreducible axioms of that part of thought we call the art of film?  This remains a pertinent question in contemporary art, one to which we can neither simply return nor abandon.  Curated by Juli Carson.  Read Brochure | Read Review | View Images

To help with envinronmental concerns, UAG / Room Gallery will no longer be sending hard copy invitations for our exhibitions / receptions in the future.  So please join our mailing list at: UAG/Room or you can email us at gallery@uci.edu.  UAG/Room will never sell, rent or share your personal information, including your e-mail address.