Visual Arts Department Hosts Open Studios

Sheena Ghanbari | March 29, 2010

A work by Visual Arts student Sadie Barnette.

On April 10, the community can take a long look at the graduate programs in the UC San Diego visual arts department. Visitors will be able to view approximately 50 open studios, a group exhibit, film and video screenings, live performances and a symposium all in one day.

All the events of Open Studios 2010 and “Permanent Transition” are free and open to the public, with free parking available at the Gilman Parking Structure.

Open Studios is the annual showcase of the Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) program at UC San Diego; it will be running from 3 to 8 p.m. in the Visual Arts Facility. What distinguishes this event from other open-studio events is that the artists at UC San Diego do not “hide their process by transforming their studio into a gallery space,” explains Open Studios Chair and second-year MFA candidate, Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli.” The UCSD event serves as a genuine reflection of how the artist “thinks, works and collaborates.”

The inaugural class of the Ph.D. concentration in art practice will also partake in Open Studios 2010. Cara Baldwin and Katrin Pesch will be integrating their work with that of the department’s MFA candidates. Pesch will be screening her film “The Yellow Wallpaper” in the Visual Arts Facility performance space. Shot at a vacant house in Beverly Hills, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is comprised of still images that are digitally manipulated to “evoke the impression of papered walls in an otherwise empty room.” Pesch explains that “the narrator’s exact depictions of the social and architectural environment are juxtaposed with the imaginary world of the wallpaper and create a scenario that is both liberating and frightening.”

A work by Josh Aaron.

The M.F.A. and Ph.D. students work in a variety of mediums, including film, and the depth of the programs’ film emphasis is highlighted with screenings presented in the performance space. One of the films included in the loop is “On the Coast,” recently completed by third-year M.F.A. candidate Merve Kayan. This 16mm film was shot in Turkey and has been accepted to the IndieLisboa festival and has already screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, !f Istanbul Film Festival, Akbank Short Film Festival and the Ankara International Film Festival. Anna Lavatelli, will be presenting a rough cut of her film “Something to Come Undone,” which depicts the story of a woman that is liberated from her hetero-domestic normalcy through contact with a feminine apparition. Another featured film is Sheryl Oring’s “On the Continuum of Fear.” Oring dramatizes everyday tensions between mother and child through this exploration of safety, danger, fear and fearlessness.

Students have prepared individual performances that will be integrated throughout Open Studios and complement the work on display. One example of an ongoing performance project is the box folding gesture illustrated by first year M.F.A. candidate, Ross Karre. Karre is a percussionist and visual artist with degrees from Interlochen Arts Academy, Oberlin Conservatory and UCSD. He will fold 100 boxes, which are marked by aimed video projections, at increasing speeds over the course of eight hours “starting from imperceptibly slow to virtuosically fast.”  Karre’s project aims to “demonstrate the cognitive conversion of declarative, procedural and proprioceptive action via fable and box folding.”

A work by Artie Vierkant.

The innovative use of fresh materials is also a distinctive marker of the M.F.A. program at UCSD. Third-year candidate Claire Zitzow embodies this with her use of gathered materials such as fish gills, discarded furniture parts and plastic oil jugs to create sculptural forms. Her work deals with the entropy of physical materials and creates a commentary on the current state of our environment’s failing natural systems.  Zitzow was a 2006 fellowship recipient form the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and winner of the John Roos Memorial Scholarship; she completed her undergraduate studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. 

“Permanent Transition,” the third annual UCSD Visual Arts Ph.D. Symposium, is being held in conjunction with Open Studios. This conference has been organized by the art history Ph.D. students and is running from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Visual Arts Facility, seminarrRoom 366. “Permanent Transition” seeks to further explore and question concepts of stability, permanence and dominance in contemporary art. There will be a keynote address by acclaimed curator, critic and poet Okwui Enwezor. He was the dean of academic affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute until Fall of 2009 and is the artistic director of Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo de Sevilla in Seville, Spain.

“Permanent Transition” will also feature graduate-student presentations by Matthew Rana (California College of the Arts), Eric Morrill (UC Irvine), and Elyse Mallouk (California College of the Arts), Rochelle LeGrandsawyer (UCLA), Holiday Powers (Cornell University), Courtney Thompson (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and Andrew Weiner (UC Berkeley).

Open Studios and “Permanent Transition” have been planned by the graduate students in an effort to engage the community and showcase the breadth and quality of creative talent at the UCSD Visual Arts Department.

Click here for more information about Open Studios 2010.
Click here for more information about “Permanent Transition.”