The Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine is pleased to present the solo exhibitions of MFA candidates Rachel Borenstein, Niloufar Emamifar, Miranda Javid, Joshua Ross and Eva Słapa. This is the second round of 2018 MFA thesis exhibitions. Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, May 19th from 2–5pm.

Memory Palace
Rachel Borenstein — Contemporary Arts Center Gallery (Front)

Memory Palace is a series of works that navigates the space between memory and matter, winding a pathway through the murky zone that lies between internal and external realities.  Mediated through the language of collage, the works in this show reenact the procedure of remembering through repeated gestures of disassembly and reassembly, order and collapse. Paint and photographs, standing in as records, are pushed, wound and scraped across multi-faceted surfaces, jutting forward with soft borders, encroaching into space and becoming tangled.

Public Air
Niloufar Emamifar — Contemporary Arts Center Gallery (Back)

Public Air examines how the liminal manifests itself in multiple registers of potency. It began with a series of interviews Niloufar Emamifar conducted with the City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning regarding the trade and commercialization of “air rights” and the legal status of blue property lines that are used to illustrate boundaries on Zone Information and Map Access System (ZIMAS). The resulting project aims to explore the induction of “non-space” into the legal representation of the governed structures and its relationship with the concept of the public. In a parallel work, Emamifar uses the aporia of Kaspar Hauser to examine the tenuous liminal space within alternating frameworks of representation, such as linguistic structures and surveys prospective notions of collapse. 

Smoke’s Last Thought
Miranda Javid — University Art Gallery (Back)

Smoke’s Last Thought is a hand-drawn, animated musical film, chronicling the journey of a rapidly diminishing wisp of smoke, rising through Los Angeles and into the ether beyond. The story describes the physical threshold between interior angst and the pluralized complexities of the community outside of the individual. Told through the experience of the amorphous figure of The Smoke, the film asks what permeation is possible. Can we inhabit and know unfamiliar bodies?

Gold Is To Be Seen In Darkness
Joshua Ross — University Art Gallery (Front)

The title Gold Is To Be Seen In Darkness makes reference to Junichiro Tanizakis essay, "In Praise of Shadows," a speculative writing that explores the development of China and Japan without Western influence. This exhibition is the first presentation of an ongoing series of performative photographs and drawings, which takes as a central point of interrogation, the physical and social construction of garments. Within the work, fabric is broken down and assembled into base structures that are then organized in alternative compositions that amplify the voice of dress. The works installed explore ideas of agency, intimacy, desire, and the ongoing interrelationships within identity itself.

"Drunkard’s Walk"
Eva Słapa — Room Gallery

While humans, as well as other vertebrates, have a closed cardiovascular system, some invertebrate groups have an open cardiovascular system. Chickens, like humans, have a closed cardiovascular system. When a chicken’s head is chopped off, the system is interrupted, yet some bodily functions remain. The headless chicken keeps on running in circles and flapping its wings. That is because the nervous system still bares the traces of living. Living is a temporal process. Losing all the traces of life by the corpse is a temporal process. A corpse is a process. One of the traces of life in the body is heat. Bodily heat can be left on a chair in the waiting room.