UCR

Website:http://www.ucr.edu

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FAR Bazaar Project

FERAL GAMUT

Description: While taking down a language chart off the walls of the Cerritos College classroom that would later transform into a space for a different language, an exhibition, we encountered the mad-lib “Feral Gamut” and had a laugh. As we continued to remove vocabulary charts, what first seemed like a quirky juxtaposition, or the makings of an inside joke, eventually resonated a truth. The process of charting a gamut of something that was once tamed to something abstracted and liberated by different surroundings suggested a fitting metaphor for the experience of these artists’ retreat from the proximity of commercial systems and proxy culpabilities of gentrification, to a wide-open space where one can unabashedly work. It is with this sentiment that we are pleased to share, “Feral Gamut” a selection of works made in the art world’s closest desert hamlet, adjacent to the World’s Largest Cup, the MFA studios at the University of California at Riverside.

Location: FA51

Participating Artists: PuiShuen (Tiffany) Chow, Merideth Hillbrand, Joe Leavenworth, Ashley May, Anna Wittenberg, Curated by Brianna Bakke, Riverside native / UCI Critical & Curatorial Studies, MFA candidate.

PuiShuen (Tiffany) Chow (b. 1987, Hong Kong, China) received her BFA at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, and is currently a first year MFA student at the University of California Riverside. Chow’s paintings evoke spaces and objects that exist between the mind and the physical world, through nuanced system of looking at the synapses between representation, abstraction and mark making. Chow engages the potentialities of crossing traditional boundaries separating disparate vernacular and media, to connect eastern and western ways of making.

Merideth Hillbrand (b. 1988) is an artist and writer currently living and working in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and is currently an MFA candidate at University of California, Riverside. Her work arcs sculptural installations, video, and text based practices.

Joe Leavenworth (b. 1985) is a Los Angeles based artist currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Riverside. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2007.  Joe works primarily in photography with recent explorations in audio, video and writing.  His artistic engagement is rooted in the tradition of documentary with projects emerging from the accumulation of fleeting and sustained engagements with people and place.

Ashley May (b. 1984, South Deerfield, MA) is a multi-media artist living in Southern California. She received her BA in Sculpture from Wesleyan University in 2007. Her work integrates sculpture, painting and photography and centers on questions of physical gesture in relation to the landscape.

Anna Wittenberg (b. 1985) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. She received her BA in Media Studies at Pitzer College and is currently working toward her MFA in visual art at the University of California Riverside. Anna merges both installation and performance correspondingly with video to explore the corporeal dimension of experience. Her work has increasingly focused on questions of both the cultural and biological significance of ‘play’ and interrogates its contemporary and historical modes.