Colloquium – Spring 2015
The UCSB Department of Art & College of Creative Studies presents The COLLOQUIUM, beginning on Thursday, April 2nd. 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 7:00pm in UCSB’s Embarcadero Hall IV.
ALTERNATIVE MODELS:
Artists, scholars, curators, community builders, writers, event coordinators, critics, teachers, designers, volunteers, professors, collaborators, dreamers. These are some of the titles adopted by the speakers who will presenting for us this quarter – exploring the many ways to make way in the multiple art worlds – and the world at large.
All lectures are free and open to the public.
4/2
Kim Yasuda and Vanesa Gingold
4/9
Paul Soto is a gallerist based in Los Angeles. He is the owner and director of the recently-opened gallery Park View, located in the MacArthur Park neighborhood. His writings have appeared in Art in America, Flash Art, and Interview Magazine, and he is the author and editor of Uta Barth: To Draw with Light, published by Blind Spot. He received his BA from Columbia University in 2008.
https://www.parkviewparkview.com/paul-pescador-color-d/
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-paul-pescador-at-park-view-20141208-story.html
4/16
4/23
The Japanese American National Museum’s mission is to promote understanding and appreciation of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity by sharing the Japanese American experience. Working there since 1992, Clement Hanami has been involved in all facets of program development from Japanese American incarceration to more recently, Japanese and Asian American Pop Culture. Having received his MFA in New Genres from UCLA, he has utilized this background in installation and video to create exhibitions collaboratively with the goal of constructing authentic representations of the individual and the community. Simultaneously, he has also continued his art practice
where much of his work deals with the question of identity shaped and experienced in a diverse society. He received the CCF Visual Arts Fellowship in 2000, the COLA award in 2007, and finished his first METRO station art project Through the Looking Glass or Traveling at the Speed of Light (Rail) in 2009.
In his talk, Clement Hanami will illustrate how an artist can blend art skills and museum practice to create purpose and meaning in one’s career.
Clement Hanami’s professional work in a museum and his personal artwork have balanced and informed each other making each aspect of this work stronger. Some of his most recent projects include traveling the exhibition Fighting For Democracy: Who is the “We” in “We the People”? for the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, a multifaceted, educational program of the museum. He is also working on an artist project for the Museum of Man in San Diego, CA where he is exploring their collection and developing an artwork to enhance and expand the narratives of their holdings.
4/30
Soul Crafters, Star Scrapers + Bee Keepers:
Local Artists + Designers of SB Forge + Iron, Fishbon Collective, Bamboo DNA + Seaborn Designs
Dan Peterson, Jonathan Smith, Ethan Turpin, Gerard Minakawa and Guner Tautrim are local artists/designers who utilize both traditional and new materials in their large-scale works. All maintain local studios/businesses here in Santa Barbara County and have worked on various past projects together. Each artist has worked on a wide range of private and public commissions throughout the world. These artists are currently working on the design, fabrication and installation of several local public art projects in Isla Vista.
SB Forge and Ironworks and Seaborn Designs are fabricating commemorative wood and steel benches in memory of each of 6 UCSB students as part of the IV Love and Remembrance Garden. Bamboo DNA and Jonathan Smith are developing a permanent, illuminated public sculpture for IV Perfect Park. Both projects will be dedicated this May in conjunction with the one-year anniversary of the IV Tragedy.
The artists will discuss their work, followed by a panel discussion with the audience.
5/7
Leila Nadir + Cary Peppermint (EcoArtTech)
New media art duo Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint’s environmental art projects take the form of architectural interventions and urban wilderness tours, net art and public performances, scholarly articles and poetic essays. Their latest work includes OS Fermentation, part of a larger series titled EdibleEcologies, which resuscitates endangered food practices in order to remediate a cultural memory disorder they call “industrial amnesia.” Their work has been supported by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Center for Land Use Interpretation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and Franklin Furnace Fund.​ They are faculty members at the University of Rochester in New York State.
5/14
Slanguage – Karla Diaz
Karla Diaz is an artist, writer, activist born and raised in Los Angeles who often uses performance, writing and installation to explore social practices and cultural relationships. In particular she uses collaborative pedagogical methods to facilitate and create dialogue among diverse communities. She has exhibited her work in local, national and international venues including MOCA, LACMA, Darb 727 Gallery in Cairo, at the Instituto Cervantez in Madrid, the ICA Boston, MDE11 Medellin Colombia, and the Serpentine Gallery in London. Karla is a former co-director of exhibitions at the New Chinatown Barbershop gallery in Los Angeles and a founding member of Slanguage Studio, an artist-run space in Wilmington, California.
5/21
Graduate student presentations from Media Arts + Technology
“Open Sources” are presentations drawn from the Media Arts and Technology graduate program’s End of Year Show at UC Santa Barbara, showcasing current student work that connects emergent media, computer science, engineering, architecture, electronic music and digital art research.
“Open Sources” aims to represent the mission of MAT: to enable the creation of hybrid work that informs both the scientific and aesthetics discourses.
The presentation will feature MFA installations, performances, and concerts by some of the artists from the MAT community. A diverse selection of work spans themes such as human-robot interaction, generative sound and visual art, experimental music, computer vision, virtual and augmented reality, and many other transdisciplinary subjects.
This year’s curatorial approach disrupts the convention of only displaying the surface-level aesthetic of a work. In the early days of media art, knowledge of programming languages was sparse, limited to a small domain of trained engineers who turned to the arts, with only the most intrepid of artists venturing to learn computer code. Today, programming is an essential skill for not only many artists, but also scientists, designers, and educators. By showcasing source code, “Open Sources” celebrates widespread code literacy while exposing the structural fabric of a piece as an additional critical dimension.
A catalog documenting both the show and MAT’s research at the cutting edge of art and technology will be available at the opening.
As a pre-opening event on Thursday evening, “Open Sources” is proud to present a lecture by Edward Zajec, Professor Emeritus of Computer Art, Syracuse University New York, titled “Spectral Modulator – The Problem of Articulating Duration with Light”.
Website:Â show.mat.ucsb.edu
5/28
I like humans
and other stories.
Artist and UCSB Professor Jane Mulfinger will be talking about her work in terms of experimentation and site-specificity, capturing the overlooked extraordinary, and the nature of being human.
6/4
April Street
installation view, Nothing Lasts Forever
acrylic on hosiery, steel, and wood
12’x7′ each
Five Car Garage, Santa Monica CA
April Street is from Virginia and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She studied traditional bronze casting in central Italy and painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include Carter & Citizen, Los Angeles, CA; Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Five Car Garage, Santa Monica, CA; and the recent acquisitions exhibition at The Santa Barbara Museum, Santa Barbara CA. She received an NEA Project Grant for her video collaboration, “Imaging Appalachia.” Press includes reviews and articles in Art Forum, Art in America, the San Francisco Arts Quarterly, Huffington Post, LA Weekly, and The Los Angeles Times. She has an upcoming solo show with Various Small Fires; Los Angeles CA in the fall in September 2015.
Street’s paintings on hosiery are artifacts of a private performative act in which the artist wraps herself in hosiery material to enact a series of precise body positions into wet paintings. Through April Street’s continuous repurposing of her painting’s material parts, she rebuilds them in a frankensteinian manner, opening up their surfaces to express not only the inner workings of the paintings history, but also to reactivate the severed limbs of a body of work to reveal the relationship that her performative paintings have with photography. The work ignites a conversation with eccentric abstraction, feminist performance art from the 60′s and 70′s, Post-Minimalism and Art Informel.