Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with A Just Noticeable Difference, a video installation by Kenny Berger.  The work’s title comes from the 19th century psychologist Gustav Fechner, whose experiments addressed the minimum change in sensory input that a person could detect.  Berger’s video installations have long been concerned with the limits of sensorial perception in art, influenced by the work and writings of Robert Morris.  Departing from classic Minimalism, however, Berger’s installations incorporate film and narrative in order to address a given historical event.  In this case, it is the uncanny arrest and conviction of the artist’s childhood neighbor, Lenny Berg, a securities broker who was caught running guns to Poland in 1984.  Perceived by the artist as a “double” or “mirror” of what we think to be normal, the case of Lenny Berg is an overture to consider the broader subject of what constitutes the “real” in both art and life.  Curated by Juli Carson.  Read More | View Images

UAG continues its Major Works of Art Series with Steve Fagin’s The Surfing Memory Syndrome.  This multi-media installation features Fagin’s 2003 film Oliver Kahn, named after the famous soccer player from Bayern Munich. The film is not a biography of the player but rather a montage of famous moments in European soccer that Fagin alternately watches, reenacts and comments upon.  Neither is the film an homage to soccer.  Rather Oliver Kahn is a dizzying detour into the question of memory – how it is constructed and/or reconstructed.  In the film Fagin ponders the strange act of watching “old fart” soccer matches from the 70s.  “As an American I have no childhood memories of soccer,” he explains.  “Can you be a true supporter without memories of ecstatic victory and traumatic loss?  Well maybe you don’t need the triumphs.  But the defeats…one’s soul would be lost without them.”  Defeat, in particular, is the psychoanalytic precept that fuels the “machine” that constructs both memory and its loss.  But it takes a detective to unpack the operation of such a machine - how it hums along, churns about and momentarily breaks down.  This is the work of Steve Fagin’s art.  Curated by Juli Carson.  Read More | View Images

Television and cinema do not record moments of reality but simply moments in the dialectical process.  Areas/eras of contradiction that have to be examined in the light of class struggle.  - Jean-Luc Godard

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the French General Strike, known simply as “May 1968,” the UAG presents Freudemocracy: 2008-1968. A montage by Juli Carson and RJ Ward, this project features a selection of Jean-Luc Godard’s films, produced from 1966-1972, which changed the face of revolutionary cinema. Through Godard’s camera-eye, we revisit the hope of ‘68 arriving, the moment of its impact, and the melancholy of its aftermath. As was his signature, the subjects of politics, aesthetics and love delicately are held in balance. 
Screening Schedule

Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Between the Blinds, a photo installation by Kelly Barrie.  As the artist explains: “The piece began with a chance event, both profound and humorous.  I came across a photograph of The Lonely Tree of Ténéré, a thorny acacia standing alone in the vast, hostile expanse of the Sahara Desert.  I discovered that in 1973 this tree met an improbable end when a Libyan truck driver (allegedly drunk) drove into it even though there were no other trees within 250 miles.  The tree perished from the collision.” Between the Blinds reconstructs this image, poetically evoking the space between 1973 and 2008, Africa and the US, photography and painting.  In so doing the reconstructed image challenges us to ponder the relation between historical memory, regional politics, and aesthetic practice today. Curated by Juli Carson. Read More | View Images

Room Gallery is proud to be an off-site venue for OCMA's 2008 California Biennial.

Lighting provided by Wendelighting, specializing in the illumination of fine art using optical projectors that bathe art with light. Wendelighting is renowned for highlighting fine art and sculpture by shaping light to the exact contour of the object with a concealed, even illumination.

transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix introduces a dynamic mix of sixteen critically acclaimed artists from Korea, Vietnam, and the United States, signaling an unprecedented engagement with the rich historic and contemporary linkages between Korea and Vietnam.  The featured artworks variously engage interconnections between the two countries, including the intersections of history, trauma, and contemporary popular culture.  The interactions between Vietnam and Korea span centuries but the exhibition focus lies in their shared history of a highly accelerated modernization process with militarized roots and the Cold War. Read More | View Images