Room Gallery

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 Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine is pleased to present the solo exhibitions of MFA candidates Andrea Welton, Mountain House, Nicolas G. Miller, Ariel McCleese and Michael Thurin. Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, May 18th from 2–5pm.

Lidija in the Buttermilks —

Alabama Hills;

Mono, Convict, June

Andrea Welton — University Art Gallery (Front)

The Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine is pleased to present the solo exhibitions of MFA candidates Maximilian Karnig, Charisse Pearlina Weston, Yubo Dong, Brandon Davis, and Anna Ialeggio. Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, April 27th from 2–5pm.

Dogsbody

Maximilian Karnig — University Art Gallery (Front)

“Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogsbody’s body.

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word “silence,” the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word “impossible” and writes it as “the end.”

– Hélène Cixous

Nowadays…the political is played out in the moral register. It still consists in a we/they discrimination, but the we/they, instead of being defined with political categories, is now established in moral terms.  In place of a struggle between ‘right and left’ we are [problematically] faced with a struggle between ‘right and wrong.’

– Chantal Mouffe, On The Political, 2005

Commissioned as the first exhibition in the UAG’s Critical Aesthetics Program, Hayes’s After Before constructed a quasi-fictional, quasi-documentary multi-channel film, in which two figures interview people on the streets of New York City throughout the month of September 2004 – just two months before the 2004 US Presidential Elections – in an attempt to illuminate the state of the nation.

Providence, Sovereignty, Volition is an installation that takes a critical stance on religious and cultural radicalism through the translation of fetishized cultural motifs. There is a subdued quality to Middle Eastern commodities, specifically Afghan war rugs made in the late 1970s, which often used patterns that subtly implied war motifs influenced by the invasion of the Soviet Union. In contemporary Middle Eastern culture, blatant icons and texts were often used as a result of the 2001 invasion of the United States.

MIXTAPE: Goodbye street, Goodbye home