MFA Studios Open April 4

March 10 , 2009

By Sheena Ghanbari

Fifty candidates for the Master of Fine Arts degree will open their UC San Diego studios and invite the public to engage with their creative processes on April 4. During the day-long event, which also features symposia, performances and film screenings, visitors will be granted a rare glimpse into artists’ working spaces with the artists themselves onsite to discuss their practices.

Painting by Jesse Mockrin

The Visual Arts Facility studios will be open from 2 to 8 p.m.

Open Studios 2009 features the work of MFA students from all three years of the graduate program in Visual Arts, recently ranked among the top 15 best Visual Arts programs in the country by U.S News & World Report.

Open Studios 2009 presents a unique opportunity to view a full range of contemporary art-making practices. Susanna Bielak, a third-year MFA student, draws from her studies in anthropology, psychology and studio arts to ground her research-based process. In "Soundtrack for San Ysidro" she addresses issues of history, memory and place in a border town by creating a series of sound pieces based on interviews with residents responding to significant sites in their community. First-year candidate Rob Duarte’s background in computing and information systems fuels his experiments with new media. While at UCSD, he has created a series of custom electronics and performance prototypes titled “The Revolutionary War Project: Media Hijacking” that subvert the regular flow of popular television culture and force the unsuspecting viewer to think about what they are seeing. In her studio across the courtyard, Jesse Mockrin, a second-year candidate, creates meticulous large-scale paintings that oscillate between idealization and the grotesque to present both historical and contemporary examinations of the human body.

Art by Susy Bielak

Taking place throughout the graduate and faculty Visual Arts Facility, the informal nature of Open Studios allows attendees to explore a rich array of aesthetic experimentation, technological investigation, social critique, mining of psychic territory and real-world intervention.

UCSD MFA candidates are invested in the enrichment of the San Diego arts community. In recent years, MFA students have initiated regional projects and programs and collaborated with local organizations, including: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT), AgitProp, Satellite Ensemble, The New Children’s Museum, San Diego Museum of Art, Casa Familiar, Lui Velazquez, SuperSonic, Compact Space Gallery and the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art.

Art by Rob Duarte

MFA candidates and alumni have exhibited widely. Venues that have featured UCSD artists include: Whitney Museum of American Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Walker Art Center, The Getty Center, BS1 Contemporary Art Center in China and Art Space Witzenhausen in The Netherlands.

UCSD MFA students have organized this day of visual and performance-based art. The event is free and open to the public (with free campus parking at Gilman parking structure on Saturdays). For directions and more information about participating artists, please visit: http://ucsdopenstudios.com

For a more detailed schedule of activities and images, please contact Sheena Ghanbari at sghanbari@ucsd.edu

Media Contact: Sheena Ghanbari, 858-822-7755