Days in Different Cadences
By Estela Moreno and Luis Moreno
Day after day for a small moment, just a couple of seconds, we attempt to navigate this brutal world by standing still in embrace. We hold each other in an attempt to care for each other, to stop each other from individually and repeatedly reciting our own eulogies.
The MFA in Art cohort of 2021 conceived their thesis projects and exhibitions apart, divided in distance and divided also in time. The summer exhibitions comprise of six from a cohort of nine: three of their number will hold their thesis exhibitions in the fall of 2021.
Life Worth Living
This series, comprised of twelve chapters documenting contemporary projects produced for 2021, imagines the curative power that aesthetic and discursive pharmakons might have in our global crisis. Curated by Juli Carson in collaboration with the University Art Galleries at UC Irvine, the series will be updated periodically as new chapters come on line.
Chapter 1: Ethics of Estrangement
this place that bears my past doesn't even know my name
this place that bears my past doesn't even know my name is an installation negotiating the desire to live with loss and remain tethered to the past through the intersections and limitations of text, light, and image.
Cixis
Spring 2020: Disassembling Greek tragedy into its parts by staging the biography of The Dowager Empress Cixi as an exhibition.
The audience and the chorus enter the theatre (place of seeing) through the parados - two piles of stone.
Fall 2020: A dirge/a bloodline, an ode/an image, an entry song/soft lights.
Her tragic flaw remains an error of images/seeing/sight - of discerning reality from theatre.
New American Paintings
Using family histories and autobiography as a framework and a single image as it’s source, the artist explores mutations of narrative, representation, access, authorship and the abstractions that occur through translation.
During spring quarter 2020, the MFA thesis exhibitions for the cohort of 2020 were set to open on April 4th at the University Art Galleries but were abruptly cancelled due to the pandemic. As a result, the galleries have since been closed to the public. As restrictions begin to loosen, we are carefully preparing to mount exhibitions once again. During the fall quarter, the UAG will present the Post-Graduate MFA Thesis Exhibitions, Class of 2020. Due to safety measures and regulations, the UAG will continue to operate remotely until further notice.
The law is not patriarchal because it denies the existence, even the power, of women...The law is patriarchal because it denies the bodies, sexualities of women. In patriarchy, there is no menstrual blood.
–Kathy Acker
The University Art Gallery is pleased to present a series of new paintings by Austrian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Katherina Olschbaur in Dirty Elements, her first solo institutional exhibition in the U.S. On view in the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery January 11th through March 14th, 2020.