UCSD Visiting Artist Lecture Series 2007-08

Vasco Araujo

Thurs, Oct 4, 7pm, Free
Vis Arts Performance Space
directions

VASCO ARAÚJO

Vasco Araújo was born in 1975 in Lisbon, the city where he continues to live and work. He completed his first degree in Sculpture in 1999 at FBAUL (Lisbon University School of Fine Art), and attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts at Maumaus in Lisbon, from 1999 to 2000. Since then, he has participated in various solo and group exhibitions both in Portugal and abroad, also taking part in residency programmes, such as Récollets (2005), Paris, and the Core Program (2003/04), Houston. In 2003, he was awarded the EDP Prize for New Artists.

Amongst his solo exhibitions have been Pathos (2006), Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca; Dilemma (2005), S.M.A.K., Ghent; L?inceste (2005), Museu do Azulejo, Lisbon; The Girl of the Golden West (2005), The Suburban, Chicago; Dilema (2004), Museu de Serralves, Porto; Sabine/Brunilde (2003), SNBA, Lisbon. Amongst his group exhibitions, the most important have been his participation in the ?Experience of Art?, La Biennale di Venezia. 51st International Exhibition of Art, Venice; ?Dialectics of Hope?, 1st Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moscow, (both in 2005); Solo (For Two Voices), CCS, Bard College (2002), New York; ?The World Maybe Fantastic? Sydney Biennial (2002), Sydney; Trans Sexual Express, Barcelona (2001), a Classic for the Third Millennium (2001), Centre d?Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona.

His work has been published in various books and catalogues and is represented in several public and private collections, such as at the Centre Pompidou, Musée d?Art Moderne (France); Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal); Fundación Centro Ordóñez-Falcón de Fotografía ? COFF (Spain); Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Centro de Arte (Spain); Fundação de Serralves (Portugal); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (USA).

http://www.vascoaraujo.org/

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Abigail Solomon-Godeau

New Directions in Art & Media History at UCSD
Fourth Annual Visiting Scholar in Art & Media History

Professor Abigail Solomon-Godeau, University of California, Santa Barbara

On Friday, February 1, 2008 the Ph.D. Program in Art and Media History, Theory and Criticism at UCSD will present a lecture by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Solomon-Godeau will be presenting her current research on the work of the contemporary Austrian artist Birgit Jurgennsen. Professor Solomon-Godeau is widely known as a historian of photography and modern art with a particular interest in feminist theory and criticism. She earned her Ph.D. at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Before becoming an art historian, Professor Solomon-Godeau was a freelance critic, curator and photographic critic and historian. She was a key figure in the emergence of theoretically-informed analysis of the photographic image in the 1980s and ?90s, associated with figures such as John Tagg, Victor Burgin, and Alan Sekula. Her first book, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices was published by University of Minnesota Press in 1991. Her second, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, on the imagery of masculinity in French neoclassicism, was published by Thames & Hudson in 1997. A third book, The Face of Difference: Gender, Race and the Politics of Self-Representation is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Professor Solomon-Godeau?s essays have appeared in such journals as Art in America, Artforum, The Art Journal, Afterimage, Camera Obscura, October, and Screen, and have been widely anthologized and translated into various languages. She has also curated a number of exhibitions, including "The Way We Live Now" (1982), "Sexual Difference: Both Sides of the Camera," (1992),"Mistaken Identities" (with Constance Lewallen) 1994; "The Image of Desire; Femininity, Modernity, and the Birth of Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century France" (with Beatrice Farwell) in 1998. She is currently working on a book entitled Genre, Gender and the Nude in French Art. The event is scheduled for 2PM in the VAF Seminar Room, and is free and open to the public.

Alison Knowles

Mon Feb 11
Music Building

Alison Knowles was born in New York City in 1933. In the Sixties she created Notations, a book with John Cage, and Coeurs Volants with Marcel Duchamp, both produced with the Something Else Press. With Fluxus she made the Bean Rolls, a canned book that appeared in the Whitney's "The American Century" (2000). The Big Book (1967) followed, a walk-in book with 8-foot pages, as well as The House of Dust. This was the first computerized poetry on record, winning her a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2001, she performed and exhibited her new paper / sound works at the Drawing Center in New York. Her Giant Bean Turner, which combines two of her favorite materials (beans and flax paper) she will perform at Guggenheim Museum in 2009. Her graphic scores are exhibited and will be performed at the Kitchen on October 20th.

http://www.ubu.com/contemp/knowles/index.html
http://www.aknowles.com/bigbook.html

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Paper Tiger TV

Wed Feb 13, 7pm, Free
Vis Arts Performance Space
directions

Now that media justice is growing from an isolated concern to an increasingly powerful national movement, it is an ideal time to look back at the pioneering work of a small New York City collective that began to address the issue 25 years ago. Paper Tiger Television (PTTV) has used art, video and media criticism to question corporate media ownership since 1981. Celebrating PTTV?s two and a half decades of leadership in media art, media activism and media analysis, the collective has produced a documentary to raise awareness of this significant history and encourage new, creative media. Screenings of the documentary and related presentations and events will be the launching point to explore how the intersection of art, activism and academic analysis can guide and inform the next generation of innovative media. Maria Juliana Byck, director and producer of "Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger Television" (2007, 45 mins) and collective member, will answer questions following the screening.

Paper Tiger has been creating fun, funky, hard-hitting, investigative, compelling and truly alternative media since 1981! The programs produced at PTTV have inspired media-savvy community productions and activism around the world. Our archive includes shows that provide critical analysis of media, educate about the communications industry and highlight issues that are absent from mainstream information sources. Through the distribution of our short documentary programs, media literacy/video production workshops, community screenings and grassroots advocacy, PTTV works to expose and challenge the corporate control of media. Because of the bias and misrepresentation of issues in mainstream media it is critical to include diverse perspectives in the process of making media. PTTV strives to increase awareness of how media can be used to affect social change. A public that can strategically and creatively use the media is necessary for a more equitable and healthy democracy.

http://www.papertiger.org

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Robert Irwin

Thurs, Feb 21, 2008, Free
MCASD La Jolla

Robert Irwin has been one of the pivotal artists in American Art for more than 46 years both as a practitioner, a theoretician, and a teacher. Irwin began his career as a painter in the late 1950s in California. In each series of canvases during the 1960s Irwin questioned the fundamental characteristics of his medium: the nature of the painted mark, the quality of light, and the limitations of the canvas itself as a bounded, rectilinear support. This process of inquiry led him to give up painting altogether and by the late 1960s he had moved away from painting to become one of the creators of the art of light and space, using ephemeral materials such as scrim, lighting and orientation to alter and heighten the viewers' perception of the space in which they encountered his work. Since the early 80s Irwin has won an international reputation for his "site-generated" works in public spaces, which often make intimate use of site conditions, architecture, natural elements, plantings and topographic features. This attitude led to several architectural installations in museums and other sites which provoked viewers into an awareness of their own processes of perception, as well as their expectations of art.

Irwin was born in Long Beach, California, in 1928, and studied in Los Angeles at the Otis Art Institute (1948?50), the Jepson Art Institute (1951), and the Chinouard School of Art (1952?54). Since his first solo exhibition, at the Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1957, he has exhibited widely in galleries and museums in North America and abroad. Irwin received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984. In 1993, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, initiated a major retrospective of his work, which subsequently traveled to Paris, Madrid, and Cologne. Among his numerous public projects, the most recent is the monumental garden he designed for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, which opened in 1997. Irwin currently lives and works in San Diego.

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Artist's Talk - Monique Prieto

27 February 2008, 6pm
Recital Hall, Mandeville Center

Monique Prieto is one of the artists featured in "In the Beginning", the current exhibition at the University Art Gallery. She was born and raised in Los Angeles and received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. In 2003, Prieto began using text taken from the nine-volume diary of a 17th Century Englishman, Samuel Pepys. Pepys is best known for his detailed firsthand accounts of major historical events such as the great London plague as well as his private and mundane accounts of his everyday life. Prieto presents the text in awkward block letters that were inspired by graffiti she saw on the side of the freeway. Like graffiti, the words are hard to read and can be experienced both as abstract form and readable text. In response to how difficult the work is to read Prieto says that she does not feel right 'making readily accessible pictures'. Prieto will give and illustrated talk about her paintings and its development from abstract form to the deployment and use of language in her current work.

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Dan Graham

Dan Graham's provocative art and theories analyze the historical, social and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems, including architecture, rock music, and television. In performances, installations, and architectural/sculptural designs, he investigates public and private, audience and performer, objectivity and subjectivity. Deconstructing the phenomenology of viewing, he manipulates perception with time delay, projections, closed-circuit video, and mirrors.

Graham was born in 1942. He has published numerous critical essays, and is the author of Video-Architecture-Television (1980). His work is represented in the collections of numerous major institutions in the United States and Europe, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and The Tate Gallery, London. He has had retrospective exhibitions at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England; The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago; Kunsthalle, Berne, Switzerland; and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; and has been represented internationally in group exhibitions at Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany; Art Institute of Chicago; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; P.S. 1, New York; American Film Institute National Video Festival, Los Angeles; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among other festivals and institutions. Dan Graham lives in New York.

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Seeing Language

6th March
East Room, Mandeville Center

This talk examines how language as a visual medium has been and continues to be interpreted within the gallery space as reflected in the current exhibition at the University Art Gallery. The panel is comprised of Liz Kotz, Kim MacConnel and Stephen Hepworth. Kotz teaches at UC Riverside in the Art History department. Her recently published book entitled Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art traces the practice of language in art to its beginnings by examining works of visual art, poetry, and experimental music created in and around New York City from 1958 to 1968. MacConnel has taught in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD in various capacities between 1976 and 1980, and permanently since 1987. He has been represented by the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York since 1975, and is one of the founders of the so-called Pattern and Decoration movement. P & D movement was a reaction to both minimalism and abstract expressionism. It allowed artists to delight in surface embellishment and bright color, and the post-Pop adherents did not shy away from the influence of design, furniture, as well as decorative arts. Hepworth is the curator of the "In the Beginning". Before relocating from London, Hepworth was the associate curator at Bloomberg Space.

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Catherine Sullivan

Wed, Mar 19, 2008, Free
Vis Arts Performance Space
directions

American artist Catherine Sullivan initially trained as an actress, and although she has worked in a variety of media, she is best known for theatre and video work that explores the conventions of performance and role-playing. Sullivan's anxiety inducing films and live performances reveal the degree to which everyday gestures and emotional states are scripted and performed, probing the border between innate and learned behavior. Under Sullivan's direction, actors perform seemingly erratic, seizure-like jumps between gestures and emotional states, all while following a well-rehearsed, numerically derived script. Unsettling and disorienting, Sullivan's work oscillates between the uncanny and camp, eliciting a profound critique of "acceptable" behavior in today's media-saturated society. A maelstrom of references and influences--from vaudeville to film noir to modern dance--Sullivan's appropriation of classic filming styles, period costumes, and contemporary spaces such as corporate offices draws the viewer's attention away from traditional narratives and towards an examination of performance itself.

Catherine Sullivan was born in Los Angeles, California in 1968. She earned a BFA from the California Institute of Arts, Valencia (1992) and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California (1997). Sullivan received a CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts (2004) and a DAAD Fellowship (2004-2005). She has had major exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2007); Tate Modern, London (2005); Vienna Secession, Austria (2005); Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland (2005); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2003); UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2002); and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2002). She has participated in the Prague Biennial (2005), the Whitney Biennial (2004), and La Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon, France (2003). Sullivan lives and works in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Berlin.

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Brian Bress

Thurs, Apr 10, 2008, Free
Vis Arts Performance Space
directions

"Brian Bress introduces a kind of narrative noise into the contemporary forms and media that circulate invisibly in the culture. These are post-cut-up forms and media and the noise is both classical and modern by definition. A classical textbook definition of noise is "any undesirable signal in the transmission of a message." Crackling in a radio transmission, static on a television screen, an ink blot on a newspaper page are noises in visual messages. A rumor without foundation is noise in a sociological message. But ultimately there is no real difference between signal and noise save the intent of the transmitter. Noise is a signal the sender does not want to transmit. Information theory expands this definition into one of cultural reception. Noise is a signal we do not want to hear. The work of Brian Bress expands the definition even further. Bress's videos and collages locate the ever-present noise that defines his subjects, making them what they are. His work reveals and exploits the oft-ignored truth that all communication is a negotiation between signal and and noise. Through his easy vascillations between established cultural signals and his own narrative noise, he creates a non-oppositional model of these concepts free of essentialist ideologies and notions of purity." -Justin Lieberman, Artist

Brian Bress is a Los Angeles based artist. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998, and his MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 2006. His collages, photographs and videos have been shown in screenings and exhibitions nationally. His most recent solo show, in 2007, was in the Zach Feuer Project Room in New York having already finished a solo show in January of that year, "Pardon Me" in the Angstrom Gallery in Los Angeles.  Bress is a recent Witt Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan's School of Art and Design. His videos will be included in "California Video," a survey of the history of video in California at the Getty Museum as well as in "Against the Grain," at L.A.C.E. in Los Angeles, in 2008. Currently Bress is working on an artist book to come out in early 2008 published by 2nd Cannons Publications.

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Mel Chin

Wed Apr 16, 7pm, Free
Vis Arts Performance Space
directions

Mel Chin was born in Houston, Texas and began making art at an early age. Chin's art, which is both analytical and poetic, evades easy classification. Politics, ecology and economics are but a few of the disciplines that intersect in his work.

Chin insinuates art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even popular television, investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. Chin's politically engaged projects also challenge the idea of the artist as the exclusive creative force behind an artwork. "The survival of my own ideas may not be as important as a condition I might create for others' ideas to be realized," says Chin, who often enlists entire neighborhoods or groups of students in creative partnerships. From 1995-1998 he formed the collective the GALA Committee that produced In the Name of the Place a conceptual public art project conducted on American prime-time television. In KNOWMAD, Chin worked with software engineers to create a video game based on rug patterns of nomadic peoples facing persecution. Chin also promotes "works of art" that have the ultimate effect of benefiting science; in Revival Field, Chin worked with scientists to create sculpted gardens of hyperaccumulators - plants that can draw heavy metals from contaminated areas - in some of the most polluted sites in the world.

Chin received a B.A. from Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1975. With numerous awards and grants from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, Art Matters, Creative Capital, and the Penny McCall, Pollock/Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Rockefeller and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundations, Chin has created many commissions, public art installations and one-person exhibitions around the world. Venues for solo exhibits have included: Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Menil Collection, Houston; and the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia.

Projects and public commissions have been installed at diverse sites such as New York City's Central Park, Pig's Eye Landfill in St. Paul, Floriadepark in rural Netherlands, Eco Tec International in Corsica, Marin County's Headlands Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Arts Festival; New York Times Magazine, West Queens High School, and the City of Corpus Christi. Group show venues have included: Fifth Biennial of Havana; Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Kuntsmuseum Bonn; Kwangju Biennale, Korea; Smithsonian Museum, D.C.; Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S. 1, and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Chin's work was documented in the popular PBS program, Art of the 21st Century. His proposal for a New World Trade Center was part of the American representation at the 2002 Venice Biennale of Architecture. A major one person exhibition, Do Not Ask Me, was seen at the Station Museum, Houston Texas in spring 2006.

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Matthew Goulish

Thurs Apr 24, 7pm, Free
Vis Arts Performance Space
directions

Matthew Goulish is Adjunct Full Professor of Liberal Arts and Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a founder member of the Chicago-based performance group, Goat Island. He has published numerous essays on performance, poetry and literature and is author of 39 microlectures: in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2000). Since the company was founded in 1986, Goat Island have been invited to present their work at various international venues and events including the Venice Biennale; the Eurokaz Festival in Croatia and the ICA in London.

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Won Ju Lim

Thurs May 1, 7pm, Free
Vis Arts Performance Space
directions

Won Ju Lim is known for creating evocative architectural forms that are illuminated by projected still and moving images. Her installations use cinematic spectacle and wonder to create animated monuments and haunting landscapes that lead viewers through a journey of colors, shadows, and light to ponder themes like fantasy, longing, nostalgia and remembrance. Beguiling and bedazzling, grounded in the landscape of Southern California, but tethered to the gauzy realm of the imagination, Lim?s multi-layered artworks are not really about utopia, nor for that matter are they about dystopia. They are neither so starry-eyed nor so cynical. But they do obliquely address those longings for the ideal of an idyllic modern paradise that California has come to represent. Employing ordinary, even banal materials, Lim?s works conjure shimmering dreamscapes, in which the built landscape of Southern California is grafted onto the idealized terrain of the imagination and transformed into something at once chintzy and sublime. Yet even as they invoke a tangible sense of longing, her installations also eloquently depict just how elusive, gaudy, shallow, unreal, and precarious those visions of paradise really are.

Won Ju Lim has made a big impression on the art world with her beautifully crafted and evocative installations. Her work speaks about today?s cities, implicating their architectural, economic and social configurations. Won Ju Lim was born in South Korea in 1968. In 1998, she received her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Since then she has exhibited in Austria, Canada, Germany, Korea, The Netherlands, Spain and the United States. Won Ju Lim is represented by Patrick Painter Inc. in Santa Monica, California. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Darren Bader

Thurs, May 8, 2008
Vis Arts Performance Space
directions

Sandwich in your midst.

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