NEWSEVENTS
Regional News and Events
MAY EVENTS
- 15th: Seminar
Past Tense Seminar: Louis Warren, UC Davis
USC; 7 p.m. until 8:30 p.m.
Overseers Room, Huntington Library
- 23rd: Symposium
The UCLA Geography Department is holding a Symposium, "Landscapings: Iconography and Beyond," and Memorial in honor of Denis Cosgrove, who died in March.
Friday, May 23, 2008, UCLA Fowler Museum
For more information http://www.geog.ucla.edu/cosgrove.php
CURRENT EXHIBITS
SKULLPHONE HISTORY MUSEUM at RAM
Exhibition Dates: Jun 3 – July 26, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7, 2008, 5-8pm
Riverside, CA: March 05, 2008 – The Riverside Art Museum announces the opening of SKULLPHONE HISTORY MUSEUM at RAM June 3 – July 26, 2008. An opening reception will be held June 7, 5 – 8PM in conjunction with the opening of three other exhibitions as well.
"Skullphone" is an artist who works anonymously in city streets and deserted highways, incorporating his artwork into the detritus of the urban environment. While ten foot tall posters loom high above building walls, small supporting incarnations of his image blend into utilitarian spaces. In these, Skullphone's image immediately cuts through the typically mundane environment of gas stations, public bathrooms, parking meters, roll-up gates, and trash dumpsters, the unique platforms and non-blank canvases from which Skullphone "speaks".
For Skullphone's installation at RAM, the artist has recreated his past street level environments within Anytown, USA while referencing new frontiers in outdoor digital media. Using the museum's alcoves as a starting point, Skullphone History Museum creates an environment reminiscent of a natural history museum's dioramas. Replacing nature with entirely man-made objects, this unnatural exhibit monumentalizes the quotidian objects of our world (our bathrooms, our hallways) built around and serving as the starting point for the artist's embedded meme.
"I have noticed Skullphone's work in cities on the East and West Coast for the past half-dozen years, and from the beginning, I found his icon compelling. Beyond simply bringing a street artist "inside," the museum and the artist have worked together to create "Rather than simply bringing a street artist into a sterile museum space, the museum has worked with the artist to use nontraditional and unexpected spaces to showcase his work," says Adult Education Curator Lee Tusman. "Like his work outside, Skullphone has placed his work in high profile spots as well as places where you may least expect it but where your eye is sure to go."
WORKS ON LOAN FROM THE 21ST CENTURY
Tuesday, May 27 – Saturday, June 21, 2008
Reception: Friday, June 6, 2008 from 6 – 9 pm
RIVERSIDE ART MUSEUM – Contemporary art practice is filled with warnings against and samplings of our presumptuous, dangerous relationship with nature. Works on Loan from the 21st Century opens to the public Tuesday, May 27 through June 21, 2008 at the Riverside Art Museum with a reception on Friday, June 6, 2008 from 6 – 9 pm. The exhibition features a blend of photographic, sculptural and installation works by seven 1st and 2nd year MFA students from University of California, Riverside.
Gideon Barnett, Alia Malley and Evans Wittenberg create photographs referencing the origin of the world by expressing an impermanent relationship between man versus nature with visuals depicting terror of the sublime or structural collapse by natural disaster.
Christine Frerichs and Courtney Oquist craft paintings focusing on the experience of nostalgia and an investigation into man's relationship to the complex environment.
Kate McPeak and Alison Walker create installation art that is built from readymade objects taken out of their natural environment. McPeak's work features an upturned raft as both a physical and metaphorical image that presupposes the viewer as just beneath the surface, unable to right the raft. Walker builds her installation from pool slides fashioned together and dominating as a sculpture in the gallery.
"Artists like these could be considered journalists of the spirit, formulating visual op-ed pieces out of their ineffable, otherwise inexpressible sense of the rightness and wrongness of the world," says RAM Senior Curator, Peter Frank. "Whether it documents natural or human destruction, proposes natural or human solutions, finds evidence of natural-human symbiosis or symbolizes natural-human conflict, the artwork of UC Riverside's graduating MFA candidates reflects their almost allergic sensitivity to the relationship of their species to the ecosphere."
Photopourri: Recent Images from the RAM Photo Artist Network
Exhibition Dates: Jun 3 – July 26, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7, 2008, 5-8pm
Curated by Lee Tusman, Shagha Ariannia, Micah Carlson
On May 27, RAM mounts an exhibition of Photo Artist Network (PAN) photographs in the museum's lobby and mezzanine. Featuring a variety of photography, from traditional film to digital work, candid's and posed, simple to complex, the work represents the diverse range of styles and approaches within the PAN group and within photography today. PAN is an affiliate artist support group of the Riverside Art Museum, made up photographers from around the region who get together monthly for workshops, field trips, critiques and lectures. This exhibition features the work of 27 member artists.
To display the variety of images, the curatorial team chose to hang the images in a chockablock "salon style" with photos flush-mounted flat and unframed. Turning the exhibit into a contemporary art installation, the placement of works are meant to forge connections between different works. Some works hang alone, while others are clustered together to display a series by a single or multiple artists. In some cases, the same work shot by different photographers allows the viewer to see the exchange and feedback between fellow artists who have met in the PAN group.
Despite having no single overarching theme, there are recurring motifs within the group of works. Images of cacti and desert landscapes harken to the call of the wild and allure of traditional landscape photography, while gritty street scenes and the repeated icon of decaying vehicles speak to the changes humans have created in the region. For some photographers, it is the abstraction of landscape, of lines of architecture or cracks in the sidewalk that catch their eye, while other photographers have captured solitary moments and impromptu group shots in the urban environment. Seen together, the patchwork of images shows the diverse visions of these Southern Californian photographers capturing their view of the world through a lens."
- November 2007 - May 2008
D+LIRIUM: by Walter Goldfarb
Exhibition Gallery, Museum of Latin American Art; Long Beach, CA
Walter Goldfarb: D + Lirium, on view in the Exhibition Gallery November 11, 2007-May 18, 2008, is an exhibition of paintings showcasing the art of a contemporary Brazilian artist who is emerging on the international art scene. The selection of 24 mixed-media paintings by Walter Goldfarb offers a tantalizing visual journey into Goldfarb's vibrant artwork created between 1995 and the present. The exhibition begins with his early works drawn from a series of works titled, Black and White Series and leads to his most recent works that are saturated with intense color and layered with textures. This series is titled Lysergic Garden and is the primary focus of the exhibition. With his electric palette and psychedelic undertones, the Lysergic Garden works are reminiscent of the 1960's hallucinogenic designs and emotions of ecstasy. Goldfarb uses color, floral motifs and plant forms to exude a sense of delirium and delight in his art. The exhibition is curated by Augustine Arteaga, Director of Museo de Arte de Ponce. A full color catalog accompanies the exhibition. Sample1 Sample2 Sample3
- Permanent Exhibit
A Bridge to the Americas: the molaa Permanent Collection
Museum of Latin American Art; Long Beach, CA
In June, the molaa Permanent Collection is presented as, "A Bridge to the Americas," offering over 80 works of art presented both geographically and thematically in two of the Permanent Collection Galleries.
The first gallery highlights approximately 25 works of art, one to four from each of the 19 Spanish/Portuguese speaking countries in the regions of Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean, to profile the various countries and their leading art movements and artists represented in the molaa Collection.
The second gallery will present approximately 60 works of art presented in 3 thematic movements-Cultural Landscapes, The Mestizaje of Identity and Spiritual and Religious Practices-offering an interpretation of the art related to the distinct and varied representation of ethnic identity, heritage and cultural practice specific to Latin America. Sample: Eduardo Kingman's Depressed Woman, 1964