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Inaugural 'Wight Biennial' Exhibition Assesses Graduate Work in North America

Carolyn Campbell (ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu) (310) 825-6540
For Immediate Use Wednesday, September 11, 1996.

The first "Wight Biennial" exhibition, featuring new work by 14 graduate students from master of fine arts programs across North America, will be on view Oct. 3 through Nov. 21 at UCLA's New Wight Gallery.

In an unconventional curatorial approach, nine UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture student members of the New Wight Gallery's board of directors each went to artists' studios and selected works for the exhibition. The selections reflect their particular artistic areas and concerns: painting and drawing, sculpture, new genres, photography and ceramics.

"As a group, we were curious about the work being made at other institutions throughout North America," notes the board of directors' exhibition statement. "Aware of the position that UCLA occupies in the art community, we were interested in exploring the aesthetic and conceptual concerns affecting students in the other top graduate programs."

Works represented in the show were created by students from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; California State University, Los Angeles; Columbia University, New York; Hunter College, New York; University of British Columbia, Vancouver; University of California, Irvine; University of Southern California; and Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

A reception for the artists will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. Oct. 3. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Admission is free. Parking on campus is $5 in Lot 3. For information, the public may contact (310) 825-3281. A catalog of the exhibition will bepublished and available for $10.

Genesis of the exhibition:

Shortly after becoming chair of the Department of Art last September, Mary Kelly establisheda board of directors to organize exhibitions that represent the art and interests of students from the School of the Arts and Architecture. The board is made up primarily of master of fine arts students in the department.

Kelly selected the New Wight Gallery space for the exhibitions, a venue that became available when UCLA moved its year-round public exhibition program to the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Westwood. With a renamed gallery and funding assistance from the UCLA Art Council, the board was able to present a full exhibition schedule last year, including MFA Thesis shows.

"Just as musicians need concerts, artists simply have to have exhibitions," Kelly says. "That's where people see work, discuss work and learn how it functions in a social context. Often people think of works, in a very utopian way, as single entities, but out there in the world and in the entertainment industry -- of which visual arts, just as music, is a part -- the work is always in the context of the exhibition."

The selection process:

The diversity of the works to be displayed at the "Wight Biennial" reflects the varied interests and concerns of the students on the board of directors. "The work is not about following a trend. The work is independent," says Jacqueline Cooper, a board member and third-year student in the painting program.

Cooper traveled to Columbia University to see the work of students in its painting program, which like UCLA's is part of a graduate program divided into areas of art practice. "I wanted to look at work that could not have been made in Los Angeles and would not have anything to do with a fashion in painting that seemed predominant here," Cooper says.

"In my own work I try and mix up a belief in myself -- or an investigation of the self --with a total disbelief in the language of painting. I picked two people, Elizabeth Cooper, who deals directly with that idea of painting as a surrogate, and Guillermo Creus, who deals very directly with believing in things. It turned out to be a reflection of the schism in my work, but that was not a conscious decision."

Second-year painting student Karin Gulbran makes realistic, figurative paintings that she describes as "pretty much self-portraits." Curious about Hunter College because of the reputation of its art program while she attended the San Francisco Art Institute as an undergraduate, Gulbran interviewed 18 painters there and selected two.

"I thought they represented opposite extremes in painting, Gulbran said. "Mark Jetton makes trompe l'oeil-like paintings. His work investigates the process of painting, and so what he ends up showing is documentations of the process without actually showing the final piece. The other painter I selected, Sunny Ream, makes very physical paintings that are more traditional, but they're about the visceral things about painting -- color, paint -- that I think are interesting."

Unlike Cooper and Gulbran, Jennifer Schlosberg chose to visit schools that do not divide their graduate programs by art practice. She is in her third year in the new genres area -- "the area at UCLA for work that doesn't neatly fall into any other category; it could be performance or installation- or video- or writing-based projects," Schlosberg explains. She also is writing a book about herself as a graduate student at UCLA that is "kind of a neurotic rendition of how I perceive everybody's perception of me." She toured the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York; CalArts; the University of California, Irvine; and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before selecting two artists, Won Ju Lim and Michelle Alperin from Art Center.

Lim's video installation "investigates the aesthetics of marketing, of how our dreams are sold to us now," Schlosberg says. "(The artist) envisions a whole suburb made up of these prefab homes that you shop for at Home Depot." Alperin's video piece tells the story of a young woman's (the artist's) relationship to Richard Simmons, a weight-loss guru, from an unusual perspective.

Student board member Evan Holloway makes objects that create a very specific experience for the viewer, whether it be hearing drums in the distance or looking at one's shoes or smelling bacon. "They tend to have their origins in my own sort of obsessions with a sound or smell of shoes," he says. For the Biennial project, he went to Yale. "There are two places that people really apply to for sculpture when they are looking at a graduate school: UCLA and Yale," he said.

Holloway selected two Yale students for the show, Carol Irving considers levels of veracity by using lie detectors and by taking on other people's identities. The results are investigations translated into musical scores and performance. The other Yale student, Rebecca Near, has made blind contour drawings of herself and of one of the many plants in her studio. The first and 10th images of each series together convey a sense of metamorphoses between the artist and the plant.

Kelly noted that curatorial work is an important element of any exhibition and often is overlooked. "Although the students and the board aren't curators, they learn a lot about how work is selected and how decisions are made about their own work when they have an opportunity like this to organize their own show," she said.

Artists represented in the "Wight Biennial":

* Won Ju Lim, Michelle Alperin; Art Center College of Design

* Erik Campbell, Charles Barlow Irvin; The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

* Tetsuji Aono; California State University, Los Angeles

* Elizabeth Cooper, Guillermo Atilano Creus; Columbia University

* Mark Jetton, Sunny Ream; Hunter College

* Karin Geiger; University of British Columbia, Vancouver

* Jeannie Simms; University of California, Irvine

* Samara Caughey; University of Southern California

* Rebecca Near, Carol Irving; Yale University, New Haven, CT

The curators:

* Kristin Calabrese

* Jacqueline Cooper

* Karin Gulbran

* Evan Holloway

* Brandon Lattu

* Reuben Lombardo

* Jennifer Schlosberg

* Mary Clare Stevens

-UCLA-



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Contact: Carolyn Campbell
Phone: (310) 825-6540
Email: ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu