The Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine is pleased to present the solo exhibitions of MFA candidates Katherine Aungier, Andy Bennett, Tarik Garrett, Rahel Levine, Margaret Oakley. This is the second round of 2022 MFA thesis exhibitions.
Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, May 15th from 2–5pm.
Katherine Aungier
The University Art Galleries is pleased to present the American Premiere of Yael Bartana’s three-channel video installation, Malka Germania, originally commissioned by the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2020 as part of Yael Bartana’s retrospective exhibition, Redemption Now. The large-scale immersive installation features an androgynous female “messiah,” who flushes Berlin’s “fears, dreams, repressed traumata and memories onto the surface,” as Jewish Museum curators Shelley Harten and Gregor H. Lersch describe.
Revolution Everywhere: Thresholds of Resistance features 3 large-scale installations by Panos Aprahamian, Heather M. O’Brien, and Simon Liu, whose artworks have been shaped by the recent revolutions taking place in Lebanon and Hong Kong. Though their aesthetic tactics and political subject matter differ, a common stance by Aprahamian, O’Brien and Liu can be observed. Within the current devastation of failed nation states and forced Disapora, a poetic approach to political events ‘makes life worth living.’
Revolution Everywhere
The Keeling
keel (v): to fall over, collapse, or capsize
Keeling Curve (n): a daily record of global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration maintained by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego (keelingcurve.ucsd.edu)
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.