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. 

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.