UCI
Website:http://www.ucr.edu
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FAR Bazaar Project
THIS IS A DEMO
Description: The MFA candidates at the University of California, Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts are pleased to present, “This is a Demo”, a group exhibition featuring new site-specific works intended to remain through the demolition process of Cerritos College’s Old Fine Arts building. The site-specific works will interpolate the site's many functions as a space for exhibition, instruction, obsolescence, and possibility. The works and installation explore occupation versus void, content versus erasure, annihilation versus creation.
“Sometimes it is necessary to make holes, to introduce voids and white spaces to rareify
the image, by suppressing many things that have been added to make us believe that
we were seeing everything. It is necessary to make emptiness in order to find the
whole again.
-Gilles Deleuze
Location: FA65
Participating Artists: Brianna Bakke, Sasha Bergstrom-Katz, Rachel Borenstein, Brandon Davis, Yubo Dong, Kim Garcia, Anna Ialeggio, Max Karnig, Kristy Lovich, Amy MacKay, Ariel McCleese, Joshua Ross, Renée Reizman, Reinhart Selvik, Corrie Siegel, Michael Thurin, Christina Tsui, Kyle Welker, Andrea Welton, Charisse Pearlina Weston
Brianna Bakke is an artist-curator based in Los Angeles, and MFA candidate in Critical and Curatorial
Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Past curatorial projects have explored
collaboration and ephemerality in the spaces of the gallery, internet, public television
and toll-free telephone numbers. As an undergraduate, Bakke studied art history and
fine art at California State University, San Bernardino and Art Center College of
Design, Pasadena, CA.
Sasha Bergstrom-Katz b. 1986, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. When her back tires from carrying 50
pound boxes of clay and her hands begin cramping uncontrollably, she makes a video,
shouldering only the crushing fear of failure. When the editing process makes her
eyes bleary and her soul heavy, she longs for a different type of malleability and
returns to the dusty studio. She commenced her BA at UW Madison and completed her
BFA at CalArts in 2008 and is currently an MFA candidate in Art at the University
of California, Irvine. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles at In Lieu, Central
Park, Arturo Bandini, Art Center (Pasadena, CA), Roberts & Tilton and she has collaboratively
presented performances with artist Sam Kahn at Los Angeles' The Smell and Machine
Project.
Rachel Borenstein (b. 1989) is an artist currently pursuing her MFA degree at UC Irvine. Her work investigates
themes of perception, memory and time. Her practice is focused on the ways in which
processes of layering, repetition and accumulation combined with gestures of deconstruction
mimic the writing and rewriting of history. She has exhibited work in Baltimore, New
York and Los Angeles and in 2011 was a fellow at the Contemporary Art Center Residency
in Troy, NY. She received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011
and currently works in Los angeles.
Brandon Davis is interested in the representation and reinterpretation of sculpture, the natural
and the manufactured. Davis received his BFA in Visual Arts from York University in
Toronto, Canada and was awarded the Ram Iron Sculpture prize as well as a membership
to Gallery 44: Centre for Contemporary Photography, where he was an instructor in
the award winning outreach program. Davis has relocated back to Southern California
and is currently an MFA candidate in Studio Arts at the University of California,
Irvine.
Yubo Dong is a photographer based in Irvine. Influenced by his undergraduate education in Hankamer
School of Business, Baylor University, Yubo Dong works largely comments to the power
structure in business organizations and in consumer cultures. His works have been
shown in ARCHES.space Dallas, Irvine Fine Art Center, Mana Contemporary Chicago, Gallery
No One Chicago, and Society for Photographic Education National Conference in Las
Vegas and Tulsa. Yubo likes coffee and making photo books and zines. UCI MFA Candidate
2019 #savetheyubos
Kim Garcia (b. 1989) is an artist living and working in Southern California. Her work investigates
interdependent relationships between objects, people and spaces. Her sculptures and
installations have been exhibited in GAIT.LA, the Torrance Art Museum, the San Diego
Art Institute and she is currently working on a exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary
Art San Diego. In addition to showing work, Kim has also previously directed portable
and mobiles spaces: Space For 2 Artists, Take-Out Gallery, and is the co-founder of
Friends Collective, an art group that explores notions of viewing within the art context.
Kim Garcia received her BA from the University of California San Diego and is currently
pursuing her MFA at the University of California, Irvine.
Anna Ialeggio makes speculative media, like sculpture, radio and movies. She is on a slippery
slope somewhere between journalism & entertainment; reportage, speculation & myth;
immersion & self-awareness; capital & autonomy. She’s worked with the Mars Desert
Research Station, Wave Farm, Kunstradio, The Hammer Museum, Art Farm, Van AbbeMuseum,
Mass MOCA, Philadelphia Mural Arts, and the Philadelphia Arts Alliance. Our gods
wear out fast; a cardboard facade does the trick. UCI MFA candidate 2019 -- Go Eaters.
Max Karnig is a Los Angeles-based painter who received his BA in both Art History and Studio Art from UCSD both Cum Laude with Honors and Highest Distinction and rounded this all out with a minor in Management Science. He has curated various exhibitions including Fiction Alters Form with Matt Rich, Joshua Miller, and Joe Yorty. Max participated in Darin Klein’s Box of Books project at the Los Angeles Art Book Fair in 2015 at MOCA. Max is currently working on his MFA at UC Irvine. His paintings work within the realm of abstraction to unwind relationships between forms that are both organic and architectonic evoking ideas of bodily interaction within domestic and institutional constraints on behavior.
Kristy Lovich: I am an L.A. based artist, writer, and cultural-worker oriented toward social and environmental justice. Currently, I am making art from a studio in my kitchen, raising a small human being, treading water as a wage earner in the non-profit industrial complex, and pursuing an MFA at UC Irvine. My practice is omnidirectional and inquiry based by nature and my intentions are set on building new forms of knowledge that explore relationships between architecture, place, language, and communication. I am concerned with the origins of the social and physical landscape of Los Angeles, the city’s perpetually transitioning environment, and negotiations of identity and belonging as they are bonded to the inheritances of white supremacy and colonialism in the American West. Emerging from this are questions about memory and perception, empathy and solidarity, intimacy and the sacred, and the role of spatial circumstances as both the architect and projected architecture of individual and social-political consciousness. I hope that my work contributes to our collective survival by creating opportunities to know one another and our world deeply, sincerely, and with radical compassion.
Amy MacKay (b. 1985) is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Her practice explores issues
of virtuality, perception and time. Since earning her BA from Bard College in 2007,
her works have been exhibited throughout California and New York, and in 2011 she
was a resident fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. Additionally, Amy is one of the
founding members of the Bayview Center for Peer Based Learning in San Francisco as
well as the collaborative women’s art collective, BGBC, based in Los Angeles. She
is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Irvine.
Ariel McCleese is a research-based artist working in sculpture, drawing, and installation. Her work
occupies the space between art and science, interrogating the methodologies of meaning
construction across both disciplines. Her most recent body of work approaches these
questions through research into the developmental biology of Lepidoptera. Her work
has been exhibited in solo shows at Leimin Space and Helen Lindhurst Gallery, in addition
to a number of group shows across Los Angeles. McCleese is a 2019 MFA candidate at
the University of California, Irvine.
Joshua Ross ( b. 1992) Indianapolis, IN. Lives in Irvine, CA. Ross received his BFA in Photography
from Herron School of Art, Indianapolis, IN. in 2015 and is currently an MFA candidate
in Art 2018 at the University of California, Irvine. His practice is informed by Gender
Studies with particular emphasis on the socio-cultural norms that create psychological
immobility. He is a recipient of the Jesse H. and Beulah Chanley Cox Scholarship,
IUPUI International Experience Scholarship, the Robert S. Eccles Artist RISE Scholarship
and National Society of Photographic Education conference award and travel stipend
recipient.
Renée Reizman is a multidisciplinary artist at the crossroads of curation, writing, and research.
She interrogates urbanization, law, and the digital humanities through the narratives
of erased histories. She has produced and collaborated on a number of performance
art, interactive installations, and workshops for Machine Project, The Women's Center
for Creative Work and 826LA, and was co-founder of ITSWOLF, a curatorial collective
that created ad hoc communities through social practice. Renée is an MFA candidate
in Critical & Curatorial Studies at the University of California, Irvine and the Curatorial
Assistant at And/Or Gallery in Pasadena.
Reinhart Selvik born 1987 in Long Beach, California. A recipient of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation
Graduate Art Award (2013), he earned a dual BA in Visual Arts/Communication at UCSD,
and is currently a MFA Art candidate at the University of California, Irvine. Growing
up rooted in underground street culture, he seeks to explore ways to manifest the
raw and visceral energies of the urban world—the complex, overwhelming sprawl—and
the effect that it has on the psyche of its inhabitants. In his work, he brutalizes
common structural materials to evoke the connections between the infrastructural,
architectural, subject, and memories contained within place and mind. He seeks to
uncover ways in which the object can translate the various frictions of the city,
to filter them through action and consciousness—ultimately expelling those thoughts
into hybrid, embodied physical forms. Imbued with tones of despair, sadness, decay,
violence and tragedy contrasted alongside desire, dreams, and aspirations, he draws
a connection between different lenses of reality that are superimposed over, and woven
within each other. He summons the moment through glimpses from his own personal reality,
aiming to reverberate the absurd beauty of life, mortality, and experience.
Corrie Siegel is an artist, curator and educator, her works often explore identity and experience
within a global system of communication.She exhibits within the United States and
Internationally. Her projects have been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, Mousee
Magazine, and Flash Art International and She was a recipient of the Six Points Fellowship,
Dream Lab Fellowship, Word Grant and Culture Lab Grant. Siegel is a founding member
and co-director of Actual Size Los Angeles, an artist collective and gallery. Actual
Size collaborates with established and emerging artists to allow for situations that
activate the exhibition and engage the public in the culture of the artists’ work.
Michael Thurin (b. 1988) is a Southern California-based visual and movement artist whose work is
situated within and against photography, performance, and dance. Thurin graduated
cum laude from San Francisco State University in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts in Studio
Art and Art History, and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California,
Irvine.
Christina Tsui b. 1989, is an artist based in Los Angeles. Tsui works with drawing, sculpture, and
photography to create encounters that fold, flop, touch, prop themselves up, and conjure
questions around ideas of ephemerality, intimacy, and multiplicity. Tsui’s work has
been exhibited around Southern California and will be shown in upcoming Spring exhibitions
at the Athens Institute of Contemporary Art, Gallery Protocol in Gainesville, FL,
and GLAMFA 2017 at Cal State-Long Beach. Tsui received a BA from the University of
California, San Diego and is a current MFA III candidate at the University of California,
Irvine.
Kyle Welker (b. 1985) I make work for bees, and for plants. I find inspiration in looking at
systems found in nature and restructuring them through my work in expanded sculpture,
installation and interactive environments. My work is found in forgotten corners of
the Mojave desert, abandoned farmsteads in rural California, and in quiet backyards
around Los Angeles. The passage of time, weather and the interaction of living things
play a collaborative role in the creation of my work. I appreciate the unknowing and
the chance that these collaborators provide and look forward to the observation of
their alterations over time. I currently spend quite a bit of time thinking and watching
things grow, as an MFA candidate at the University of California, Irvine.
Andrea Welton, (b. 1988), is a painter from Half Moon Bay, CA currently residing in Orange County,
CA. She is a 2019 UC Irvine MFA candidate and received her BFA from Art Center College
of Design. This past summer she was a participant of the residency, Picture Berlin.
Her work has been exhibited at the Palos Verdes Art Center, San Diego Art Institute,
Mein Blau Projektraum, Berlin and tête, Berlin.
Charisse Pearlina Weston is a conceptual artist and writer whose practice focuses on the deconstruction and
reconfiguration of language, representation, and history. She has presented and performed
at Project Row Houses, DiverseWorks, Elsewhere Museum, among other venues. In addition,
she has participated in residencies at Alabama Song Houston, Atlantic Center for the
Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. She has received awards from the Artadia Fund for
the Arts, the Santo Foundation, the Sally Hands Foundation, the Dallas Museum of Art’s
Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund and was a 2016 Southern Constellations Fellow at
the Elsewhere Museum in North Carolina.
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