Curated by Kelly Donahey and Ian Meares
Reception:
The University Art Gallery’s Critical Aesthetics Program – the tripartite investigation of art, politics, and theory – has featured internationally renowned artworks by mid-career artists since 2005. Critical Aesthetics: The First 10 Years celebrates over a decade of exhibited film installations in the UAG that have included works by Yael Bartana, Molly Corey, Andrea Geyer, Adria Julia, Yoshua Okon, Dorit Margreiter, Florian Pumhösl, Constanze Ruhm, Koki Tanaka, Kerry Tribe, and Erika Vogt. The Critical Aesthetics Program was founded by Juli Carson.
Sensuous Discontent: Critical Aesthetics The First 10 Years
The production took the subject matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process of alienation:...
Curated by Juli Carson
Reception: Saturday, October 1, 2016 - 2:00pm
Commissioned as the first exhibition in the UAG’s Critical Aesthetics Program, Hayes’s After Before constructed a quasi-fictional, quasi-documentary multi-channel film, in which two figures interview people on the streets of New York City throughout the month of September 2004 – just two months before the 2004 US Presidential Elections – in an attempt to illuminate the state of the nation. Interrogating mythic and imagined constructions of “nation,” “people” and “choice,” the interviewers also interrogate their own desire for knowledge and communication. As an artwork, moreover, After Before engaged and disrupted the libidinal temporality intrinsic to that unique moment of all elections: a single day – much anticipated – that would shape the future of the na...
Curated by Allyson Unzicker
Reception: Saturday, October 1, 2016 - 2:00pm
The University Art Gallery is pleased to present On this Island, a solo exhibition by Rosalind Nashashibi. Nashashibi’s films challenge perceptions that form around closed communities and the parallel realities that form within them. The exhibition consists of two films including her most recent Electrical Gaza, presented on the west coast for the first time. Originally commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, Electrical Gaza was filmed during the artist’s trip in 2014, directly before Israel’s military operation against Hamas-ruled Gaza. The film portrays footage of everyday life, which cuts intermittently between live action animation. As a result of the siege from both Israel and Egypt, Gaza exists as an island onto itself defined by extremely tight border...
Curated by Juli Carson
Reception: Saturday, October 1, 2016 - 2:00pm
The latest in the UAG’s Emerging Artist Series presents three filmic works by Maura Brewer, produced between 2014 and 2016. Each work takes as its site a recent film by the actress Jessica Chastain, starting with Zero Dark Thirty in 2012, followed by Interstellar in 2014 and the ending with the 2015 film The Martian. In all three films, Chastain plays a similar character: a high-achieving career woman who is dedicated to the pursuit of a non-romantic male counterpart, from Osama Bin Laden to Mark Watney (Matt Damon). In each case, Chastain’s role speaks the language of popular feminism; her talent and work ethic has propelled her into a successful career in a largely male realm. She makes choices that drive forward the action of the plot. But Chastain’s agency...
Curated by Amy Sanchez-Arteaga
Apr 15, 2016
Reception: Friday, April 15, 2016 -
Participate in the discussion and activation of contributions from: Notes on the Occasion of the Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a bilingual anthology reflecting on what it means to inhabit the spaces we call Southern California and Northern Mexico 20 years after NAFTA’s implementation.
Anthology Contributors:
Antena
Alicia Garza
Manuel Paul López
Cristina Rivera-Garza
Pepe Rojo
Amy Sanchez-Arteaga
Ultra-Red
Schedule:
Location: Student Center—Moss Cove Room A
10:30AM Part 1: Contributor Readings
Readings and Discussion with contributors Pepe Rojo, Manu...
Curated by Juli Carson and Daniel Joseph Martinez
Reception: Thursday, March 31, 2016 - 6:00pm
The University Art Gallery is pleased to present the 12th Annual Juried Undergraduate Exhibition.
When you track, you pick up a string. At the far end of the string a being is moving, existing, and still connected to the track you gaze on – the movement that’s still contained in the track - along with the smallest of details that helps you become the very prey you track.
No form alone defines tracking. Its means can either be analog or digital, realistic or abstract, while its ends are equally unfixed. On any given day, it is used by cyber agents to keep tabs on persons of interests; forlorn lovers to reunite with a long lost betrothed; or even artists and writers as they attempt to trace their existence from one canvas or page to another. As...
Curated by Juli Carson and Daniel Joseph Martinez
Reception: Thursday, March 31, 2016 - 6:00pm
Providence, Sovereignty, Volition is an installation that takes a critical stance on religious and cultural radicalism through the translation of fetishized cultural motifs. There is a subdued quality to Middle Eastern commodities, specifically Afghan war rugs made in the late 1970s, which often used patterns that subtly implied war motifs influenced by the invasion of the Soviet Union. In contemporary Middle Eastern culture, blatant icons and texts were often used as a result of the 2001 invasion of the United States.
The exhibition evokes comfort and terror by juxtaposing soft wool rugs with replicas of assault rifles, symbolizing the era of freedom and oppression between 1979 and 2001. The material used to make the rifles relates directly to ancient canons an...
Lecture by Rainer Bellenbaum
Mar 10, 2016
Reception: Thursday, March 10, 2016 -
The spatial dimensions of rehearsal become clearer with cinema. Filmic exercisings or alternations of action are closely related to the positioning in a concrete space or even to a shifting of location. This kind of dynamic placing brings into play the perspective-related meaning of action. Different from dealing with „the empty space“ of theatre (Peter Brook) or with the „any-space-whatever“ of a studio close-up (Gilles Deleuze) the specific filming spot is configured by pre-cinematic significances especially if the spot is an authentic location. Those films that combine an improvised, varied or verifiable action with the perception of cinematic translocation open the chance to gain social and aesthetic experience for every participant (author, protagonist, beholder …). To clarify this...
Curated by Juli Carson
Reception: Saturday, January 9, 2016 - 2:00pm
H.M. is a two-channel presentation of a single film based on the true story of an anonymous, memory-impaired man, the famous amnesiac known in scientific literature only as “Patient H.M.” In 1953, when he was 27 years old, H.M. underwent experimental brain surgery intended to alleviate his epilepsy. The unintended result was a radical and persistent amnesia. Though he was no longer able to make lasting memories, his short-term recall, lasting about 20 seconds, remained intact. He lived anonymously in this condition for more than half a century until his death on December 2, 2008, in a Connecticut nursing home. His case is widely credited with revolutionizing our understanding of the organization of human memory.
H.M. consists of a single 16mm film t...
Curated by Andrew McNeely
Reception: Friday, January 9, 2015 - 2:00pm
The UAG is pleased to announce the premier of Restless Debris, an exhibition featuring the work of Kevin Jerome Everson, Michelle Dizon, and Ivor Shearer. The aesthetic concerns of the three artists participating in this exhibition consider the voice’s role in relationship to the deployment of “ruin imagery.” Mounted together, their artworks are both symptomatic and critical of a far larger trend emerging in the wake of the Great Recession. This trend is a growing prevalence in popular culture of ruin gazing as a means to allegorize the decline of the United States.
Ruin imagery, such as the iconic images of postindustrial decay, feed into a larger national narrative about the avarice of civilizations and the disastrous environmental catastrophes wrought on by u...
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