A Solo Project By Yoshua Okón
Jan 09, 2014 to Mar 15, 2014
Reception: Thursday, January 9, 2014 - 6:00pm
Yoshua Okón’s Salò Island conceptually begins with a crime scene: the murder of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Giuseppe Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old hustler, was arrested and confessed to murdering Pasolini. However, in 2005 Pelosi retracted his confession, bringing renewed attention to both Pasolini’s homicide and artwork, the latter of which was regularly the subject of censorship. Pasolini's first novel, Ragazzi di vita (1955), which dealt with the Roman lumpenproletariat, resulted in obscenity charges. His final film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), was a scathing critique of fascism that employed explicit scenes of sadistic violence. Based on the novel 120 Days of Sodom, by Marquis de Sade, Salò is considered his most controversial film.
Curated by Amy Sanchez and Andrew McNeely
Jan 09, 2014 to Feb 08, 2014
Reception: Thursday, January 9, 2014 - 6:00pm to 9:00pm
The body which we inhabit and which is for us the irreducible measure of all things is not in itself irreducible.
-David Harvey, Spaces of Hope
A Solo Exhibition by Victoria Fu, Curated by Kellie Lanham
Jan 09, 2014 to Feb 08, 2014
Reception: Thursday, January 9, 2014 - 6:00pm to 9:00pm
In Siegfried Kraucer’s 1926 essay Cult of Distraction he describes the opulent movie palaces of the 1920s as possessing a “surface splendor,” one enticing viewers to forget the hardships of living within an industrial society. The intoxicating lure of the screen and its ability to take us out of our harsh reality is as relevant now as it was some 100 years ago. As movie palaces have given way to other spectacular screens – television, smart phones, laptops, and tablets – we find that magnificent distractions still have an enduring following: this is the site of Victoria Fu’s solo exhibition Cult of Splendor.
Curated by Michael Moshe Dahan
Nov 11, 2013 to Dec 02, 2013
Reception: Monday, November 11, 2013 - 7:00am
In anticipation of artist Yoshua Okón's new commissioned work for the CAC Gallery in January of 2014, the University Art Gallery and the Department of Art present SEX, MONEY, FASCISM: A PASOLINI FILM SERIES. Yoshua Okón will produce a film installation on the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the controversial Italian filmmaker, poet, writer and intellectual. Giuseppe Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old hustler, was arrested and confessed to murdering Pasolini. However, in 2005 Pelosi retracted his confession, bringing renewed attention to both Pasolini’s homicide and artwork, the latter of which was regularly the subject of censorship.
Curated by Juli Carson
Oct 03, 2013 to Nov 27, 2013
Reception: Thursday, October 3, 2013 - 6:00pm to 9:00pm
The Symbolic Landscape’s thematic derives from Rosalind Krauss’s critique of pictorial form, made in her 1984 essay “The Originality of the Avant-Garde.” There she reminds us that Jane Austen had challenged the conventional notion of the “picturesque” as early as 1818, at which time the picturesque was conceived as being “remarkable for its singularity” and thereby “afforded a good subject for landscape.” Krauss is quick to point out the semantic paradox of conflating “singularity” (nature) and “landscape” (painting), well before the avant-garde would ponder the same phenomenon within the field of art. For it was this same paradox that directed a branch of modernist and postmodernist artists throughout the twentieth century, from Marcel Duchamp to Sherrie Levine.
A Solo Exhibition by Will Rogan, Curated by Allyson Unzicker
Oct 03, 2013 to Nov 27, 2013
Reception: Thursday, October 3, 2013 - 6:00pm to 9:00pm
Will Rogan’s solo project, A Twice Lived Fragment of Time, connects the past to the present through the simple act of collecting and organizing obsolete imagery. Composed of images gathered from de-accessioned library books, Rogan’s artwork sheds new meaning on what has been forgotten. This archive of the outmoded not only references the desires of a nostalgic return; it also probes the politics involved in governing information to the public. In the process, poignant questions arise. At what moment in time is information yielded obsolete, and to what end are decisions made to relinquish this information from our systems? Revisiting these fragments of time now lost, Rogan’s work reaches out to the past imaginatively to rethink our future.