Room Gallery

Will Rogan’s solo project, A Twice Lived Fragment of Time, connects the past to the present through the simple act of collecting and organizing obsolete imagery. Composed of images gathered from deaccessioned library books, Rogan’s artwork sheds new meaning on what has been forgotten. This archive of the outmoded not only references the desires of a nostalgic return; it also probes the politics involved in governing information to the public. In the process, poignant questions arise.

The figure refers, not to what the human solitude of the amorous subject may be, but to his “philosophical” solitude, love-as-passion being accounted for today by no major system of thought (or discourse). – Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Sam Watters’ Greenhouse.  Tugging at the boundaries between conceptual and pictorial art traditions, Watters’ masterfully rendered watercolors collectively represent the palindrome “Live not on evil” in topiary form.

Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Stephanie Taylor's Chop Shop.  A "site-specific" installation of sculpture, photography, and song, Chop Shop presents objects, images, and sounds derived from a rhyme schema based on the word "Room."  Conceived in a Surrealist vein, the "rhyming" objects are at once bizarre and compelling.

Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Adrià Julià's latest project Truc Trang Walls.  At once lyrical and factual, Truc Trang Walls "documents" the building of a house in North Vietnam by Diep Nguyen who, for the past 25 years, has lived with his family in the outskirts of Long Beach in Southern California, not far from a neighborhood commonly referred to as Little Saigon.

Patrolling is, in fact, my principle occupation. No matter how tight security, I am always somewhere outside giving orders and inside this straight jacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead of every moment, thought, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection. --William S. Burroughs

Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Shana Lutker’s latest project The Future of an Illusion.

UCI's Room Gallery continues its film screening series with The Pursuit of Silence, curated by Adrià Julià.  The ad hoc film series starts with Elie Wiesel's assertion that silence has its own bone structure, its own labyrinths and its own contradictions - the assassin's silence being neither the victim's nor the spectator's.  In all 14 films, silence plays a leading role.  Each director introduces the artificial presence or absence of silence to reveal an emotional structure and authority of cinema. 

WEEK I

Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Chilean artist Cristóbal Lehyt's installation piece Reduced to Insults.  This multi-media exhibition posits the concept of fatalism (or defeatism) as a strategic mode of resistance within the global geo-political sphere.  Employing drawing, video and sculpture, Lehyt's work combines political content with poetic aesthetics to comment specifically on the Southern California / Mexican border dialogue as an allegory for larger cultural issues pertaining to the "Global South." 

Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Live Like Him! a video installation by Molly Corey.