Tuesday, April 1st

Laurel Beckman

Working with and nurturing eccentric public spaces, Laurel Beckman's art practice highlights perception and public display. Attending to themes at the crossroads of consciousness + social conditions, meta-physics + science, Beckman's practice investigates perceptual phenomena, language, the built environment, and animal-human relations. Employing a wide range of media and distribution strategies, her sanctioned and unsanctioned projects often enlist commercial and civic spaces in her efforts to contribute meaningfully to the cultural landscape. Recent major projects include "Day Tripper", a multi-city psychogeographic work that maps cities according to the experience of natural and artificial light; "Phantasm", a semi-permanent public art commission in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in part in collaboration with the UCDavis Veterinary Ophthalmology Service, and Carnegie Mellon University; "All Matter is Smart", a 50 foot street facing window project for the UICA (Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts) in Grand Rapids, Michigan; and "Everything is Beautiful", a 103 foot long exterior wall project for Barbara Bestor Architecture in Los Angeles, California. She is an associate professor of art at the University of California Santa Barbara. A life-long resident of coastal California, Beckman's current major work, "The Biggest Seed Fruit Nut in the World" celebrates and ponders relations between coconuts and housing, shelter and delirium, through multiple series of images and objects inspired by Los Angeles' Dome Village (1993-2006), a self-governing homeless community of geodesic domes.

Tuesday, April 8

Kim Beck

Drawing with images of architecture and landscape, Kim Beck makes installations that survey peripheral spaces. Overlooked weeds and storage sheds are layered in mixed media projects. Mass-produced multiples, graphite drawings, or rudimentary animations, the projects bring the banal and everyday into focus. Beck has most recently shown work in drawing, print and installation at Smack Mellon and Plane Space in New York City, and in Los Angeles at Bank Gallery and Raid Projects, and as the Emerging Artist of the Year at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Other recent solo exhibitions include Climate Control at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids as well as other locations throughout the United States and abroad. Group exhibitions featuring her work have taken place at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, Bradbury Gallery at Arkansas State University, the Attleboro Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Denver Art Museum. She has been awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, grants by the Tennessee Arts Commission and NYSCA, as well as the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for an independent project in Europe, Australia and Japan. She has held residencies at Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York, Vermont Studio Center, The College of Fine Arts in Sidney, Australia, the Northern Territory Museum in Darwin Australia, Yale Norfolk, Plane Space in New York City, and most recently at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts supported by a grant from the Heinz Foundation. She is Associate Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a BA from Brandeis University.

Tuesday, April 15

Jane Mulfinger

Cognitive and recognitive encounters with matter and ephemera within the specifics of locational context have been driving concerns across Jane Mulfinger's many and diverse projects. Often with a particular audience in mind, Mulfinger engages formal and anecdotal site-relative information in each body of work, sculptural, installational, and performative. "Regrets," shown in London, New York, Estonia, Turin, and Derry, utilized the collected misgivings from each community while "Common Knowledge" redeployed xenophobic jokes to expose regional rivalries within the European Union. She has shown at major international venues such as the Mayor Gallery and Camden Arts Center in London, the Southhampton Museum of Art, the Orchard Gallery, Derry, the Center for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, and the Franklin Furnace Archive, New York, as well as in alternative spaces around the world including Projects U.K., Newcastle, (now Locus+), St. Pancras Railway Station, London (with Camden Arts), an Italian baroque church (Flaxman Gallery), and a Belgian 'alms house' (Belgian Biennial). She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Royal College of Art in London.

Wednesday, April 23

Wangechi Mutu

(note this will take place on wed 23rd 8pm via A&L at Campbell Hall)

Wangechi Mutu's drawings couple collaged parts of idealized women clipped from fashion magazines with drawn and ink-soaked passages. They are rooted in the history of Kenyan traditional story telling and postcolonial horror stories. Subtly and painfully twisted images reference traditionally-clad African women. As a process of mutation is recognized through careful scrutiny, the images prove hard to stomach. Kenya's past of enormous resources and privilege now faces a crisis of confidence in tackling poverty, civil strife and political instability. This dichotomy is reflected in the work of Wangechi Mutu.

Wangechi Mutu is a Master's graduate of the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT, and attended the Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences, New York. Her work has been included in the second Johannesburg biennale, Translocations at CUNY, Magic City at Brent Sikkema Gallery in New York, Out of the Box at the Queens Museum, NY, and Africaine at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY.

( text copied from http://www.momentaart.org/pas_pro/mutu.html )

Tuesday, April 29

Eddo Stern

Eddo Stern works on the disputed borderlands between fantasy and reality, exploring the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation. His work explores new modes of narrative and documentary, experimental computer game design, fantasies of technology and history, and cross-cultural representation in computer games, film, and online media. He works in various media including computer software, hardware and game design, kinetic sculpture, performance, and film and video production. His short machinima films include "Sheik Attack", "Vietnam Romance", "Landlord Vigilante" and "Deathstar". He is the founder of the now retired cooperative C-level where he co-produced the physical computer gaming projects "Waco Resurrection", "Tekken Torture Tournament", "Cockfight Arena", and the internet meme conference "C-level Memefest". He is currently developing the sensory deprivation game "Darkgame" recently featured at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Tuesday, May 6

George Legrady

George Legrady holds a joint appointment in the Department of Art and the Media Arts & Technology graduate program. His research and production work in interactive media installation bring together a number of specialized interests such as the language and aesthetics of interaction design, collaborative narrative development through audience interaction and data management through semantic categorization using neural-net based self-organizing map algorithms. Recent interactive installations have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma Helsinki 2004; the "Aura" exhibition, Budapest 2003; the Ars Electronic Arts Festifal, Linz 2003; the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival 2003; the Centre Pompidou, Paris with Pockets full of Memories, 2001; Transitional Spaces at the Rotunda, Siemens World Headquarters, Munich, 1999/2000; Tracing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998 and the Kunst und AustellungHalle der Bundes Republik, Bonn 1997-98; a solo retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa, 1997- 98; Slippery Traces at the Palais des beauxarts, Brussels, 1997, also in Deep Storage, a travelling exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, 97; the Kunstforum, Berlin, 1997; the kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf, 1998; PS1, New York, 1998. Awards include Creative Capital Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts Visual Fellowship, Canada Council Computer Media Awards, and Honorable Mentions at Ars Electronica, Linz in 1989 and 1994. His cd-rom publication An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War received the New Voices, New Visions prize from Voyager and Interval Research Corporation. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Tuesday, May 13

Clemens Von Wedemeyer

Clemens von Wedemeyer, whose works have recently been displayed, in an individual exhibition, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, presents condensed images, rather than linear plots in his films. He produces documentary essays with characters, which are systematically broken, by occasionally, blurred pictures and sounds, film quotations, dramatic lighting effects, and the impossibility of identifying space and time, which produces the effect of density in sober - factual sequences, which, in turn, become metaphoric images, outside time and space. Action is often isolated, placed in an alien context, making everyday scenes appear absurd. The documentary character of the film evaporates, especially, since the film's concepts are loops and fragments. But Wedemeyer's works are not attempting to avoid reality. They are, rather, an approach at doing justice to its complexity. Many films are accompanied by a corresponding "making of", explaining the conditions and the background of the production. "Making of" provides information, that influences how we decode the film and, in many cases, reinforces the absurd and metaphorical aspects. Wedemeyer's works deal with the following themes: social/societal development and power structures, and the relationship to architecture, space, and the city.

( text copied from http://www.lwl.org/LWL/Kultur/skulptur-projekte/kuenstler/wedemeyer/ )

Tuesday, May 20

Lisa Jevbratt

Lisa Jevbratt is a Swedish born artist, currently an associate professor in the Art Department and the Media Art Technology program at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work, ranging from internet visualization software to biofeedback and interspecies collaboration, is concerned with collectives and systems, the languages and conditions that generate them, and the exchanges within them. The projects explore alternative, distributed and unintentional collaborations and expressions of these collectives. Her projects have been exhibited internationally, 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). Her work is discussed in numerous books, for example, in "Internet Art" by Rachel Greene and "Digital Art" by Christiane Paul (Thames and Hudson). Jevbratt also publishes texts on topics related to her work and research, for example in the anthology "Network Art - Practices and Positions" (Routledge).

Tuesday, May 27

David Pagel

David Pagel is a freelance writer and art critic for the Los Angeles Times and author of Darren Waterston: Representing the Invisible (New York: Charta Books Ltd., 2007). He is Associate Professor of art theory and history and Chair of the art department at Claremont Graduate University. In addition to his forthcoming exhibit, "Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion," at the Blaffer Gallery (co-curated with Terrie Sultan and Colin Gardner), Pagel has also organized such exhibitions as Painting <=> Design, Claremont Graduate University (2007); 702 Series: Sush Machida Gaikotsu at the Las Vegas Art Museum (2007); and Populence at the Blaffer Gallery (2005). He has been awarded the Macgeorge Fellow, University of Melbourne, Australia, and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Contemporary Arts Criticism.

Tuesday, June 3

Colin Gardner

Working at the intersection of film, art and interdisciplinary media theory, Colin Gardner earned his M.A. in History from St. John's College, Cambridge and Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at UCLA before becoming Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches in the Departments of Art, Film & Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and the History of Art and Architecture.

Gardner has published two books in Manchester University Press's "British Film Makers" series: a critical study of the blacklisted American film director, Joseph Losey (2004), and a monograph on the Czech-born British filmmaker and critic, Karel Reisz (2006). Related research has also appeared in the Franco-American film journal, Iris; the Parisian web-based theoretical journal, Critical Secret No. 6 (2001), Interdisciplinary Humanities (2002), and Media History (2006). He is currently researching a book on Samuel Beckett's experimental work for film and television and its relationship to Gilles Deleuze's critical and philosophical writings on cinema.