Contemporary Arts Center Gallery

UC Irvine’s University Art Galleries (UAG) will present the first survey of one of the most iconic figures of the Chicano art movement, Gilbert “Magu” Luján (1940–2011) and an accompanying publication. One of the founding members of the Chicano artists collective Los Four, Luján is known for his coloration and visual explorations of Chicano culture and community that drew upon and brought to life various historic and contemporary visual sources with startling results: Pyramid-mounted low riders driven by anthropomorphic dogs traversing a newly defined and mythologized L.A.

H.M. is a two-channel presentation of a single film based on the true story of an anonymous, memory-impaired man, the famous amnesiac known in scientific literature only as “Patient H.M.” In 1953, when he was 27 years old, H.M.

Libidinal Economies: Art in the Age of Bull Markets takes as its economic mise-en-scène the bull run market of 1982 (that crashed in 1987), tracing its origins in monetary policies of the 1970’s, and mapping its echoes in the recent redux of this bull run from 2009 to the present. The New York Stock Exchange (where the selling and buying of securities, currency and commodities takes place) and the art world (where the critique of Wall Street culture is derived and scripted) presumably constitute two distinct psychic and fiscal economies located in two different physical locations.

In the live work Beautiful Radiating Energy (2004), K8 Hardy performs and shouts, her exercising body cross-cutting a video collage. In New Cuts, this performance is experienced in video and in other creatively-inflected documents and paired with New Report: Morning Edition (2005). New Report: Morning Edition is a real report on objectification by the camera and language of Hardy's with a collaborator, Wynne Greenwood. New Cuts is an exhibition of performative activity by Hardy and an exhibition about the viewer's viewing.

Yoshua Okón’s Salò Island conceptually begins with a crime scene: the murder of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Giuseppe Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old hustler, was arrested and confessed to murdering Pasolini. However, in 2005 Pelosi retracted his confession, bringing renewed attention to both Pasolini’s homicide and artwork, the latter of which was regularly the subject of censorship. Pasolini's first novel, Ragazzi di vita (1955), which dealt with the Roman lumpenproletariat, resulted in obscenity charges.

The UAG is proud to present the US premiere of Yael Bartana’s ... and Europe will be stunned.   This exhibition was the official Polish participation at the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice.  It is also the inaugural event to be held in the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery at UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts.

Names are inextricably linked to one's identity, functioning as "symbolic forms."  A proper name is a "designator of reality," as Jean-Francois Lyotard has put it, which grounds a subject within the Cartesian laws of the world.  What if this referent is altered, changed or twisted?  Will it leave a particular subject uprooted, its identity deconstructed?

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.