a civil act

UC Irvine’s Art Undergraduate Honors Program of 2014 presents, a civil act: a culmination of a yearlong studio practice program directed by Professor Daniel Joseph Martinez. The six student artists:  Katelyn Dorroh, Maria Guerrero-Solórzano, Kat Hamrock, Lana Linet, Suzana Poghosyan and Jason Michael Stepina will exhibit work from their vigorous investigations and developed art practices. 

a civil act, encapsulates the gesture that could be found in each of the works featured in the exhibition. In Rousseau’s mind a civil act is a gift that implies a “public deliberation.” In the production of making art, one starts with an observation, proceeds with a deliberation and then follows with a gesture. Resistance or complacency both form a civil act.

In her Tower Viewer series, Katelyn Dorroh presents freestanding objects of various materials that form a multi-layered landscape for the viewer to navigate and negotiate their own perception of object, obstruction, and image. Traditional Tower Viewers, placed at vistas throughout the globe, function to augment sight, with the belief that improved sight will facilitate further understanding of what is seen. These Viewers purpose is to augment the understanding surrounding the pragmatic nature of perception, with a hope that these explorations will facilitate further understanding of pedestrian, visceral, and reflexive interpretations of stimuli.


Maria Guerrero Solórzano’s Burned on to the Eyes of the Mind is a collection of works that reflect on the subject of the Los Angeles riots in 65’ and 92.’ The prose that is pulled through redaction and leftover from the archived political literature remains as a poetic residue that collapses the rhetoric of that which bears power and that which revolts against it. Revealing the threads from the woven fabric of power structures burned on to the iris of our mind.


Kat Hamrock presents Argos, the wall with eyes. Punctured and penetrated, the wall’s face morphs with the imperfections of shallow caves in which light is held– in the same way that light is absorbed and refracted in our eyes. Each rupture will take a place in the grid of space, creating a bridge between myth and other structured anthologies of the institutional context. 


In a plethora of images, and where the cliché is that everything has already been done, Lana Linet focuses on the space between what is real and fake within a given environment.  From this an aesthetic-conceptual proposition is laid bare: how does the self fall into that an ambiguous space? The combination of abstraction, assemblage and figuration reflect the constant influx of images, all the while enforcing a sense of confusion when one enters a liminal space that questions the recognizable and the familiar.


Suzana Poghosyan presents Kasab v #Kessab, a sculptural installation that uses panned audio. Veils surround a recording of Wagner's Flight of the Valkaries, as it plays next to a recording of a 2012 execution video. The video was falsely linked to the evacuation of Kessab, Syria, which took place in late March of this year. False videos and images created a moment of internet driven hysteria. Like soldiers leaping into combat, the news around Kessab was suspended in uncertainty as images and videos flew on social media.

 
Anxieties around identity augment as we double ourselves digitally. What is this new Other that lies behind our screen? The self multiplies and creates recursive versions that collapse the subject with the object. In Close Encounters with my Other Self, Jason Michael Stepina uses computers, mirrors, video chat software, and his “Self” to explore digital identity dissociation as it creeps into the future, reaching for an unknown consciousness. 

Artist: 
An Undergraduate Honors Thesis Exhibition
Exhibition Dates: 
Jun 05, 2014 to Jun 13, 2014
Reception: 
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 6:00pm to 9:00pm