Arts Colloquium – Fall 2013
The UCSB Department of Art & College of Creative Studies presents The COLLOQUIUM, beginning on Thursday, October 3rd. The COLLOQUIUM offers a wide range of voices exploring the topics of contemporary art, theory, and cultural production by emerging and established visiting artists, as well as members of UCSB’s own distinguished Art faculty. All lectures are free and open to the public, held every Thursday from 5:00 to 6:50pm in UCSB’s Harold Frank Hall #1104.
For directions to location, visit https://www.aw.id.ucsb.edu/maps/
Fall 2013
10.3.13
Richard Ross *UCSB Arts Faculty
Richard Ross is a photographer, researcher and professor of art based in Santa Barbara, California. Ross has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Fulbright, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. Ross was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 to complete work on Architecture of Authority, a critically acclaimed body thought provoking and unsettling photographs of architectural spaces worldwide that exert power over the individuals confined within them. Ross’s Guggenheim support also helped launch an investigation of the world of juvenile corrections and the architecture encompassing it. This led to Ross’s most recent work, Juvenile In Justice, which turns a lens on the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities that treat, confine, punish, assist and, occasionally, harm them. A book and traveling exhibition of the work continue to see great success while Ross collaborates with juvenile justice stakeholders, using the images as a catalyst for change.
Ross’s work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, London; National Building Museum, Washington D.C; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Aperture Gallery, New York; ACME. Gallery, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. He was the principal photographer for the Getty Conservation Institute and
the Getty Museum on many of their architectural projects. He has photographed extensively for the Canadian Center for Architecture, Nike, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, SF Examiner, Vogue, COLORS, Courrier, and many more. A dozen books of his work have been published including Architecture of Authority (Aperture 2007), Waiting for the End of the World (Princeton Architectural Press 2005), Gathering Light (University of New Mexico 2001) and Museology (Aperture 1988). Ross has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1977.
10.10.13
Tiffany Chung *UCSB Art Alum 2000
Tiffany Chung’s cartographic and installation works examine conflict, migration, urban progress and transformation in relation to history and cultural memory, exploring the recovery and growth of specific cities that were traumatized by war or natural disaster. Drawn to the process of transformation, not only in the physical destruction and reconstruction of the city but also the psychological realm of its inhabitants, Chung’s video and theater works reflect human loneliness, struggle, and endurance when society drastically transforms itself.
Chung’s work interweaves specific historical events with spatial and sociopolitical changes to reflect the multilayered relationship between site, map and memory. Her current studies on the decline and disappearance of towns and cities due to deindustrialization, land development, demographic change, environmental catastrophe and extreme climate impact investigate the complexity of urban progress and population aging in post-industrial societies. Chung’s recent mixed-media installations
create allegorical fantasies that imagine our world at the end of the human race and examine the aftermath of colonization and modernization.
Currently based in Saigon, Tiffany Chung holds an MFA from University of California, Santa Barbara (2000) and a BFA from California State University, Long Beach (1998).
She has participated in numerous museum exhibitions and biennials around the world, including the Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, UAE (2013); California Pacific Triennial, Newport Beach, USA (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art Kumamoto, Japan (2013); Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia (2012); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA (2012); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, USA (2012); Singapore Art Museum, (2012); Kuandu Biennale, Taipei, Taiwan (2012); Singapore Biennale (2011); Sorlandets Kunstmuseum, Norway (2011); Centre de Cultura Conteporània de Barcelona, Spain (2010); Campbelltown Arts Centre, Australia (2010); Incheon International Women Artists’ Biennale, Korea (2009); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, USA (2008) and Arko Museum, Seoul, Korea (2007); Fukuoka Triennale, Japan (2005). Chung has had solo exhibitions at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York (2012, 2010), Fukagawa Tokyo Modan Kan, Tokyo (2011), Galerie Christian Hosp, Berlin, Germany (2009).
Her upcoming projects will be presented at Carré d’Art Musée, Nimes and Lieu-Commun Espace d’Art Contemporain, Toulouse, France (2014).
https://www.trfineart.com/artists/tiffany-chung
10.17.13
Jenny Hart
Jenny Hart was born in 1972 in Iowa City and raised in rural Illinois. She is best known for her artwork in hand embroidery and her design company Sublime Stitching. Hart’s work has been published in numerous books and magazines including Vogue, Nylon, Spin, The Face, Juxtapoz, The New York Times Magazine and others. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, Paris, London and New York.
Jenny Hart is also an award-winning author of seven titles on embroidery for Chronicle Books. Jenny’s work is in multiple public and private collections of note, including the estate of Elizabeth Taylor and the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Jenny has lived in Kansas, France and Texas. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
10.24.13
Kip Fulbeck * UCSB Arts Faculty
Kip Fulbeck is a pioneering artist, spoken word performer, and filmmaker. He has been featured on cnn, mtv, the today show, and pbs, and has performed and exhibited in over twenty countries and throughout the U.S. He is the author of several books including mixed: portraits of multiracial kids; part asian, 100% hapa; and permanence: tattoo portraits, as well as the director of a dozen short films including banana split and lilo & me.
Kip Fulbeck teaches as a professor of art at U.C. Santa Barbara where he received the university’s distinguished teaching award and has been named an outstanding faculty member five times.
In recognition for his work promoting multiracial awareness, he was awarded the inaugural loving prize at the 2009 mixed roots film & literary festival and also named a cultural pioneer at Harvard University. A complete overachiever despite being only half-Chinese, he is also an avid surfer, guitar player, ocean lifeguard, pug enthusiast, and multiple-time national champion in U.S. masters swimming.
https://seaweedproductions.com/
10.31.13
Maya Gurantz *UCSB New Visiting Arts Faculty
Maya Gurantz uses video, performance, and installation to interrogate how constructions of gender, race, class and progress operate in American communities, shared myths, public rituals and private desires; in so doing, she dissects the contradictions embedded in performances of power. Formally, Maya draws on her extensive background in movement-based theater and dance, as well as historical vernacular forms of manipulating sensation. Most recently, Maya’s work has been shown by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, High Desert Test Sites, Autonomie Gallery, LAX><art, workspace=”” gallery,=”” glamfa,=”” and=”” movement=”” research=”” at=”” judson=”” church.=”” <=”” span=””>Maya Gurantz is artist working in video, movement and performance, installation and community-generated projects. She has created new works in New York, rural Mississippi, San Diego, the SF Bay Area, and most recently, LA. Her company, Temescal Labs, has been recognized as one of most original performance companies in the Bay Area and has received grants and awards from the NEA, CCI, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Theater Bay Area, the Puffin Foundation, and the Bay Area Critics Circle. Gurantz has a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from UC Irvine. https://mayagurantz.com/
11.7.13
A special film screening and introductory lecture:
Jessamyn Fiore : Gordon Matta-Clark
Thursday November 7, 5pm, Pollock Theatre, Carsey-Wolf Center, UCSB
In her presentation, curator and writer Jessamyn Fiore, will provide a rich foreground to the filmic works of Gordon Matta-Clark, understood within the context of the artistic community that surrounded his relational practices in the early 1970’s.
Preceding Fiore’s 5pm lecture at the Pollock Theatre, a public conversation about the Matta-Clark archives and his artistic genetics and processes will take place with Jessamyn Fiore and Nicholas Olsberg, independent curator and advisor to the Matta-Clark Estate at the McCune Conference Center at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center from 230-4pm.
Jessamyn Fiore has done extensive research on the Matta-Clark’s life and artistic practice as co-director of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark with her mother JaneCrawford, Matta-Clark’s widow. She has curated a number of related exhibitions, including the group show, 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970-1974) at the David Zwirner Gallery, NY in 2011. In 2012, Fiore edited her first book by the same title, 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974), published by David Zwirner and Radius Books. The project features a number of works exhibited at 112 Greene Street (including works by Gordon Matta-Clark, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Richard Nonas, Larry Miller, Alan Saret, and Richard Serra), as well as extensive interviews with many of the artists involved in the space, a timeline of all the activity at 112 Greene Street in the early years, and installation views of the 2011 exhibition.
Jessamyn Fiore is a curator and writer currently based in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, NY in 2002, Fiore relocated to Ireland where she ran her own theatre company for three years. She received a Masters in contemporary art theory, practice, and philosophy in 2009 from The National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
Fiore became the director of Thisisnotashop in 2007, an independent art gallery dedicated to supporting emerging artists based in Dublin, Ireland. She has curated major Thisisnotashop exhibitions including Gordon Matta-Clark FOOD (December 2007), Fluxus with Larry Miller (May 2009), No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents held at X-Initiative in New York City (June 2009) and the TATE Modern in London (May 2010). She also founded The Writing Workshop with Jessica Foley in Dublin, a collaborative forum for writers and artists who work with text.
Recently Fiore curated her second exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City titled Gordon Matta-Clark: Above and Below (April 2013) and a solo exhibition of Clive Murphy titled Neo Proto Demo at Kling & Bang, Reykavaik, Iceland (May 2013). She has an original text and performance included as part of the current Bureau For Open Culture exhibition Last Year in Marienbad Redux at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York City.
The conversation and lecture/screening on the life and work of Gordon Matta Clark, have been co-sponsored by the Department of Art, College of Creative Studies, the Center for Film Media and Television, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UCSB.
This event is presented in conjunction with the First Ojai Art Festival, featuring the reconstructed homage to Gordon Matta Clark’s 1971 Garbage Wall, a pioneering work of environmental art and activism built around the theme of art and waste. The Garbage Tower installation will be built in a single day, alongside the town’s busiest street, using trashed, obsolete and castoff objects collected by local school children.
“In 1970, to signal the first Earth Day, the young New York architect and artist Gordon Matta- Clark constructed a temporary installation called ‘Garbage Wall’, a construction of cement, wire mesh and debris collected from the streets of the city. It was at once a witty critique of a wasteful society, a challenge to its mania for building, and an object of beauty that called on the community to become more engaged with its environment. In the years since, the wall has been re-created a number of times by museums as part of exhibitions of the artist’s work. This installation has only been done 15 times around the world but never on the West Coast – until now.”
For more program information:
UCSB Department of Art + College of Creative Studies Fall Arts Colloquium Series
UCSB Carsey-Wolf Center For Film Television + Media Pollock Theatre
UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
11.14.13
Alice Wang * UCSB New Visiting Arts Faculty
Alice Wang is a Los Angeles based artist and filmmaker. Working in sculpture, drawing, digital media, and experimental film, Alice explores various scientific, technological, and metaphysical systems to imagine new aesthetics forms. In the same way that mathematics can be used as a perceptual organ, art making for Alice is a method of invention and discovery of alternative temporalities. Materials, forms, genres, and ideas become malleable in her creative process, which allows for surprises and the unexpected to happen. Alice received her BSc from the University of Toronto, BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and MFA from New York University. Between 2012 to 2013, Alice was living and working in Paris through the support of the Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation. She was recently a Villa Aurora Fellow in Berlin. Alice has exhibited at Immanence (Paris), The Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), Cutlog Art Fair (New York), and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, among others. She will be having a solo exhibition at Galleri Detroit Stockholm in Sweden this fall. Alice currently teaches Photography and Critical Theory in the Art Department at UCSB.
https://llllllllllllllllllllll.com/
11.21.13
For over 25 years, Russell Crotty has created and exhibited a large body of art work, manifested in globes, drawings and books. His art has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is owned by private collectors, museums and public collections. In his practice, he explores the very things he loves most: amateur astronomy, the natural world and surfing.
A native Californian, Russell grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, began and nurtured his art career in Los Angeles, lived in the Santa Monica Mountains and now resides in two locations: Ojai and Upper Lake, California with his wife Laura Gruenther, a graphic designer.
https://www.russellcrotty.com/
11.28.13
“The First Thanksgiving” (1915), by Jean Louis Gerome Ferris (American painter, 1863-1930).
12.5.13
A cross-department presentation and conversation with:
Jenni Sorkin * UCSB New History of Art + Architecture Faculty
Jenni Sorkin writes on the intersection between gender, material culture, and contemporary art. She is currently finishing a book titled The Rural Avant-Garde: Experiments in Ceramics, which examines the confluence of gender, artistic labor, and the history of post-war ceramics. She has published widely as an art critic, and her writing has appeared in the New Art Examiner, Art Journal, Art Monthly, NU: The Nordic Art Review, Frieze, The Journal of Modern Craft, Modern Painters, and Third Text. She has written numerous in-depth catalog essays on feminist art and material culture topics. She has been an invited lecturer at Dia Beacon, Ohio University, the School of Visual Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Textile Museum of Canada. She sits on the Editorial Board of Art Journal and in 2013, was Guest Editor of the Art section of Gulf Coast, a literary and fine arts journal based in Houston. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design at the University of North Carolina, Asheville (2012), the Getty Research Institute (2010-11), and an ACLS/Luce Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in American Art (2007). In 2004, she received the Art Journal Award. In 2010, she co-organized “Blind Spots/Puntos Ciegos: Feminisms, Cinema, and Performance,” for the eight edition of SITAC, the International Symposium of Contemporary Art Theory, held in Mexico City.
https://www.arthistory.ucsb.edu/faculty/sorkin.html
Lisa Jevbratt *UCSB Arts + Media Arts + Technology Faculty
Lisa Jevbratt is a Swedish born artist and a professor in the Art Department and in the Media Art Technology program at University of California, Santa Barbara. For more than a decade she explored the expressions and exchanges created by the protocols and languages of the Internet and the Web, often manifesting as visualization software. She is now applying her understanding of these unintentional collaborations onto exchanges with animals of other species and their experiences of the world around them. In her ongoing endeavor “Interspecies Collaboration” she invites students to collaborate with individuals of other species and her current software-art project Zoomorph is software generating simulations of how non-human animals see.
Jevbratt’s work has been exhibited extensively in venues such as The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), The New Museum (New York), The Swedish National Public Art Council (Stockholm, Sweden), and the Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); and it is discussed in numerous books, for example “Internet Art” by Rachel Greene, “Digital Art” by Christiane Paul and “Art + Science Now” by Stephen Wilson (all Thames and Hudson). Jevbratt also publishes texts on topics related to her projects and research, for example “Inquiries in Infomics”, a chapter in the anthology “Network Art – Practices and Positions” ed. Tom Corby (Routledge) and “Interspecies Collaboration, Making Art Together with Nonhuman Animals” in Tierstudien [Animal Studies] Issue 1 (Neofelis Verlag, Berlin, Germany). Her current project Zoomorph -is supported by a Creative Capital grant.