Upcoming Talks and Events




  • FULL PROGRAM CALENDAR

    I        

    Opening Reception

    Thursday, February 21, 5:30-8:30pm

     

    6:30pm performance of Across a Tiled Pathway, an adapted teleplay by Ethan Breckenridge.


    Across a tiled pathway to a lacquered front door, past a chrome statue of a leaping dolphin, and beyond a flowering vine climbing the perimeter wall, are the streamlined balconies and scalloped roof of a large art-deco villa, its powder-blue awnings like reefed sails. The ocean-liner windows and porthole skylights seemed to open onto the 1930s, The entire structure had recently been repainted, and a phosphor in the white pigment gave its surface an almost luminescent finish, The house is silent, but somewhere in the garden is a swimming pool filled with unsettled water. Reflections from its disturbed surface seemed to bruise the smooth walls of the house. The light drummed against a woman’s sunglasses, giving her the edgy and vulnerable look of

    II          

    Artist in Conversation
     Friday, February 22, 11:00am

    Artist Ethan Breckenridge in conversation with curator Michelle Y. Hyun. Together they will perform the artist-in-conversation-with-the-curator talk, discussing the project We’d love your company with and against Breckenridge’s artistic practice, the context of the University Art Gallery and the University as setting, notions of hospitality, and participatory formats and practices. What constitutes the Invitation?  Where does it come from?  Into what are you/we being invited?  Why extend the invitation – now? What kinds of subjectivities does the Invitation produce?  Who are the hosts? Who are the guests?  Is the Invitation a feeble or powerful gesture? How might we bolster it or break it apart?  Audience participation is politely requested.

     

    III         

    Student Loans

    March 11, 9:00a - March 23,12:00a, 24 hours/day

    A 24/7 study space, hosted by the UCSD Public Education Coalition, during the week before and of Winter Quarter Final Exams. Student Loans reconfigures the exhibition space of the gallery into an active location for knowledge and culture production. By recreating the milieu of a reclaimed library, while also providing the functional necessities for studying and learning about the effects of private capital within the university, the UCSD Public Education Coalition will not only create a needed space on campus but also a counter-archive to resist effacement of social and educational justice initiatives.  Study supplies and refreshments will be provided. For up-to-date events, visit their Facebook page.

    One of the many groups on campus defending equal access to affordable education in all forms and for all communities, the UCSD Public Education Coalition seeks to defend the tradition of education by engaging and empowering students, organizing public events that promote education as, not only a public good, but an economic and social right. The PEC actively calls on University of California administration to start putting people before profit. To see literature they have published, check out their blog at: http://reclaimucsd.wordpress.com

     

    IV         

    Premiere Screening      

    Thursday, March 28, 4:00pm *Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled.

    Premiere screening of a video produced by Ethan Breckenridge at UCSD.  The video will be screened continuously during exhibition hours in the UAG video gallery thereafter.

    Daylight rattles through the elegant walkway, uncovering stately building shapes that appear like articles of furnishings sitting on an impeccable but uneven green carpet.  The buildings, like great printed drapes of a minimal-silkscreen, imply man's ascent from the unicellular organisms of the Cambrian Period, to the first heavier-than-air flight at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the perpetually chilly buildings of the late century; utopic spaces that seem to slumber, waiting to wake to our future better selves.  The polished cement walkway is quiet, still too early for the breeze, yet somewhere the last watering systems have just stopped, and everything is arching from the new morning’s warmth.  Coffee in hand, four people eagerly but unconvincingly, regard both bent scripts and each other pleasantly. 

    V           

    Contemporary Art’s Evasive Social Reality

    Wednesday, April 3, 6:00pm

    A talk by Suhail Malik, with corresponding shadow puppetry performance by Van C. Tran.  Socially-engaged and participatory art often seek a constituency beyond or outside of the art field that it emanates from, constituencies such as the public, a multitude, citizens, communities, and so on. Such art strives to adapt itself to a reality beyond art’s own artifice and limitations, while also mobilizing its constructions to generate more just social realities. Yet, for all that, it is still art — ‘only’ art.  In relation to the reality it seeks to impact, art then only ever falls short of what it could be and wants to be, its freedom and imagination is that of a shadow play.  Contrary to this paradigm of contemporary art, an art that avows its institutional condition and limitation — for example, educational establishments — rids itself of the phantasm of a social reality that remains forever out of reach. This art can shape and establish its public as its subjects, as a social actuality in which it can intervene. But such an art is not contemporary art.

    Suhail Malik is a writer and holds a Readership in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, London, where he is Programme Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art. For 2012-13, Malik is Visiting Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. 

    Van (rhymes with "fun") C. Tran uses overhead projectors to display “shadow poems” based off her relational experiences of the everyday.  She received her MFA in Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is the recipient of various awards from the Central Coast: Isla Vista Arts, Friday Academy, and smART families from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited in the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, alternative spaces in Los Angeles, and San Diego Space 4 Art, an artists’ warehouse. Van currently lives and works, as an arts administrator and teaching artist, in San Diego, CA.

    Co-sponsored by the Visual Arts Department, Discursive & Curatorial Production Initiative.

     

    VI         

    A Specific Piece of Music (It All Started Right Here, Act 1, Scene 1 April 11. San Diego, California, 4pm Pacific Time)
    Thursday, April 11, 4:00pm

    A musical performance by Rachel Mason, in collaboration with The Preuss School UCSD, that intervenes into an undisclosed public location, parallel to a version within the gallery, invites both participation and spectatorship by the uninitiated. Will an impromptu rendition of a well-known anthem rouse engagement or hostility? Can you participate without invitation? What forms of engagement are initiated when the host is not there? A collaboration with student musicians, the performance will attempt to unsettle distinctions from the unfamiliar, uninitiated, and uninvited. A Specific Piece of Music is the first location and launch of a broader, long-term project by Mason, a collaborative performance film entitled It All Started Right Here. To watch the performance's livestream online, visit https://qik.com/itallstartedrighthere.

    Rachel Mason collaborates with musicians, dancers, actors, and other artists to realize large scale multi-media experimental operas and film projects. She has toured, exhibited sculpture, video and performance internationally, including the Whitney Museum, Queens Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Henry Gallery in Seattle, James Gallery at CUNY, University Art Museum in Buffalo, Sculpture Center, Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard College, Kunsthalle Zurich, The New Museum, Park Avenue Armory, and EMPAC Center for Performance. Mason recently completed The Lives of Hamilton Fish, a musical feature film, and will soon release her first album with her band, Little Band of Sailors.





    VII        

     

    Art in Public
    Monday, April 22, 4:00pm

    Artist Martha Rosler will present past and recent projects, focused on the role of the "visitor," including the most recent iteration of Meta Monumental Garage Sale at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2012) and its historical origin at UCSD in 1973. In conjunction, she will present other projects in which she collaborated with women migrant workers in Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale (2011) and teenage migrant sex workers from Africa in Turin, Italy (Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2011). Her presentation will also consider her work on urban systems, including photo-text projects about the changing neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as well as recent and earlier pojects about The Bowery area in New York before and after gentrification. Rosler will also touch on her contemporary and historical work in opposition to war, from anti-Vietnam War photomontages to a renewal of this approach in response to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Martha Rosler is an artist working in video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Her work deals with the separation of the public and private sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment. She has published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and gentrification. A retrospective of her work has been shown internationally, and her writing is published widely in publications such as Artforum, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst. She graduated from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1965 and received her MFA from UCSD in 1974.

    Co-sponsored by the Visual Arts Department, Visiting Artist Lecture Series.

    VIII       

    Front Page

    Thursday, May 9, 6:30pm

     

    Liz Magic Laser, in collaboration with actor Audrey Crabtree, draws upon the language of the corporate retreat and the work of Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal, to present a performance-based workshop in which audience members will asked to create tableau vivants of current front page newspaper images. The workshop is one of their various collaborative projects based on The Living Newspaper, a populist form of agitprop theater that emerged in the early 20th century, presenting the current events and social issues. 

    Liz Magic Laser lives and works in New York City. She is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Columbia University’s MFA program. She has exhibited internationally at venues including Mälmo Konsthall (2012); Swiss Institute with Forever & Today, Inc. (2012); The Studio Museum in Harlem (2012); Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2012); Performa 11 Biennial (2011); MoMA PS 1 (2010); Artisterium, Tbilisi, Georgia (2009); and Prague Biennale 4 (2009). She is a current resident at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program, New York, and, in 2013, will present solo exhibitions and commissions at DiverseWorks in Houston, Texas, and at the Westfälische Kunstverein in Münster, Germany. Liz Magic Laser is her real name from birth.

    Audrey Crabtree is an award-winning collaborative artist.  Devising performance as an actor, director, writer, clown and bouffon, she creates for theater, festivals, galleries and found spaces.   Her work in the theater has garnered Drama Desk Award and a NY Innovative Theatre Award. At the NY Art House, Collective: Unconscious Audrey led a group of performers in a weekly improvisation based on The Living Newspaper.  She met and began working with Liz Magic Laser in her performance I Feel Your Pain in 2010 and thereafter continued collaborating on various projects based on The Living Newspaper.  Crabtree is co-founder of the company Ten Directions, the International NY Clown Theatre Festival, and NY Physical Comedy Lab, and has taught devising and performance in UK, India, Mexico and in universities across the United States.

     

    All events will take place at the University Art Gallery.