Continuing our Critical Aesthetics Program, the CAC presents Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan's Cabo Nombre, a site specific installation addressing Jack Langson Library, 1 of 8 original buildings on UCI campus designed by architect William Pereira in 1965. In an attempt to learn and appropriate the façade of this iconic builiding, Zinny / Maidagan present large-scale hand-made drawings on paper and unfolded planes of fabric. Historically, the library's serial repetition of architectonic units stemmed from the economic and technological availability of "pre-cast concrete." More specifically Langson's façade consists of a three-dimensional element repeated in an almost military order in relation to the broken line of the surrounding mountain's horizon vista, contrasting orthogonal order with interrupted immensity. This signatory element, which is repeated on Langson's façade, has a female morphology — both uterine and test tube — as if Nature had turned itself into a serial machine of the identical. Zinny / Maidagan transform these units in their sculptural "fabric-drawing," conceived and designed specifically for the new CAC Gallery's sixty-foot uninterrupted wall space. Continuing the working methodology that Zinny / Maidagan have employed in previous works, Cabo Nombre returns to this historical site, replete with social and political connotations, and appropriates Langson's abstract visual language as a means of reinterpreting it in the contemporary moment. In every way, Cabo Nombre is thus historically and poetically an allegorical work of art. Curated by Juli Carson. View Images | Read Brochure

 

Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan were born in Rosario, Argentina. From 1994 - 2002 they lived in New York City. Since then, they live and work in Berlin. As recipients of the prestigious DAAD, Guggenheim and Pollock Krasner Awards, they have exhibited internationally. Numerous scholarly catalogues have also been produced on their work. Most recently their site-specific art projects have been featured at the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, the 7th Gwangju Biennale in Korea, The Generali Foundation in Vienna, and the 50th Venice Biennale.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

- Marcel Proust

Continuing our Critical Curatorial Series, the UAG presents If Memory Serves, an interdisciplinary exhibition of international emerging artists. Conventionally, we understand memory as reflecting a coherent personal history. However, memory simultaneously produces an illusory chronicle — a paradoxical combination of what is lived and what is perceived. We might ask, therefore: what or whom does memory serve? As a response to this quandary, If Memory Serves examines the act of remembrance as both an individual and collective production. Through and across various mediums — including hyperrealist drawing, large-scale installation, abstract sculpture, narrative photography and film — the exhibited artworks ultimately uncouple memory from linear storytelling. In so doing, the difference between global versus local, private versus public, and the sublime versus the real are collapsed. As reconceived through these artworks, memory thus performatively binds the subject's "inner" and "outer" worlds in the most poetic form. Curated by Kellie Lanham, Isabel Theselius, and Allyson Unzicker.

 

Featured artists: Martin Dahlqvist, Cristina David, Tamara Henderson, Bessie Kunath, Judith Raum, and Martina Sauter

 

Cristina David, The Square, 2004, (detail) single channel video, 5:34 courtesy of the artist

Names are inextricably linked to one's identity, functioning as "symbolic forms." A proper name is a "designator of reality," as Jean-Francois Lyotard has put it, which grounds a subject within the Cartesian laws of the world. What if this referent is altered, changed or twisted? Will it leave a particular subject uprooted, its identity deconstructed?

There have been various reasons for artists to create alter-egos, personae, doppelgangers and to adopt pseudonyms. These strategies are used to blur the boundaries of fact and fiction - of reality and imagination - and to (re)insert themselves into historic canons. Previous attempts to undermine and question subjectivity and modern authorship became virulent with the major paradigm-shifts of the 1960s and 70s. Supported by the critical discourses around subject-construction and authorship initiated by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, artists started to challenge the traditional idea of the authorial, creative subject and the institutional framework surrounding artistic production.

With a Name Like Yours... presents artworks and writings by international artists who use contemporary versions of these strategies as mode of interrogating the principals of the art market as well as the post-Fordist pressures of individualization. These tactics of disguise evolve around an almost schizophrenic split between the absence and the presence of the artist-subject that characterizes our capitalist society, a condition more relevant than ever in articulating socio-political critique. Read More | View Images

Artists include: Hina Berau/Judith Fischer, Zoe Crosher, Ricarda Denzer, Mario Garcia Torres, Matthias Klos, Warren Neidich, Roee Rosen, Isa Rosenberger, Unknown Artist, Untitled Collective, Laura Wollen, Donelle Woolford, Ronda Zheng and others

This exhibition is made possible by generous support from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture.

Matthias Klos, Names Talking to Each Other, 2012 (detail) courtesy of the artist

For three decades, South Korean society has experienced a dramatic political paradigm shift from an authoritarian regime to a democratic polity. During this time, art was a productive site of social imagination, giving tangible form to the seemingly universal notions of democratic participation, public culture and civil society. Being Political Popular: South Korean Art at the Intersection of Popular Culture and Democracy, 1980-2010, showcases 17 artists and collectives who investigate the questions of politics, collectivity and social engagement through a range of mediums, including comics, painting, woodblock print, collage, photography, installation, performance and video. Specifically, the exhibition situates art within South Korean popular culture - a discourse that came to maturity alongside the country's democratization - now touted as the Korean Wave (hallyu) due to its status as a global cultural phenomenon. The artworks' interaction with popular culture is clearly demonstrated here - on occasion art both drove and formulated the very cultural ethos of the time. While complicating the division between political resistance and popular entertainment, Being Political Popular seeks to recuperate the aesthetics of humor, satire and pleasure latent in examples of the most radical Korean political art.

Artists include: Choi Byung-soo, Kim Dong-won, Labor News Collective, Park Jae-dong, Kim Min-gi, Hong Sung-dam, Hein-kuhn Oh, Minouk Lim, mixrice, siren eunyoung jung, listen to the city, Chan-kyong Park, Seung Woo Back, Park Bul-dong, Nam Gung Ho Seok, Sangdon Kim, and Minari & Hack.

This exhibition is part of the conference Political/Popular: Intersection of Democracy & Popular/Public Culture in South Korea organized by Kyung Hyun Kim and David E. James.

Co-sponsors: Academy of Korean Studies (AKS), Arts Council Korea (ARKO), Critical Theory Emphasis, and Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at University of California, Irvine.

 

Seung Woo Back, Blow Up (2005-7), digital photographs (detail)