Faculty Spotlight: February 2021
Updates from the School of the Arts and Architecture faculty
The creative and scholarly contributions of the UCLA Arts community mine the complexities of the human condition, ask essential questions of our time, and expand the potential of creativity. Read more for a list of recent accolades and current and upcoming virtual and in-person exhibitions, performances, and lectures.
Kyle Abraham, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, and his dance company A.I.M are currently participating in a 4-week “bubble residency” at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park and the Lumberyard Center for Film and Performing Arts. The residency is made possible with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Associate professor and vice chair in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design Kutan Ayata's firm Young & Ayata was honored by the AIA New York with a design award for DL1310 Apartments, a mid-market residential building in Mexico City, consisting of seven 1-2 bedroom apartments with parking in the basement.
Judy Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles
Judy Baca, distinguished professor emeritus in the Department of Chicana/o Studies and the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, was featured in a panel titled “What Are Today’s L.A. Women Fighting For?,” presented by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. The panel, which was presented live on the Zócalo Public Square YouTube Channel, is available to view on-demand at the Natural History Museum’s website.
Baca will also be featured in several upcoming exhibitions. Her work, “Poetic Justice,” created alongside Mildred Howard and Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, will be at the Plaza in Santa Fe from Aug. 14, 2021 until Mar. 6, 2022 thanks to the New Mexico Museum of Art. Additionally, Baca’s mural “The World Wall” will be on display at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA from Nov. 14, 2021 until Mar. 6, 2022.
Erkki Huhtamo, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, is working with Masaki Fujihata, a 2020 Regents Professor, to create a major location-based augmented reality artwork for L.A. that deals with the dislocation of the Japanese population from L.A. during World War II. They have met online biweekly since Masaki left L.A., and hope to show the project publicly in 2022.
Huhtamo has also created a UC-wide online research and discussion forum titled "Distance and Proximity" with Peter Bloom (UC-Santa Barbara) and Weihong Bao (UC-Berkeley), and are extending their core team to UC-Irvine and UC-Santa Cruz.
Candice Lin, A Robot Spoke What My Father Wrote, 2019. Courtesy the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles. Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber
Candice Lin, assistant professor in the Department of Art, will have work in the 13th Gwangju Biennial, titled Minds Rising, Spirits Turning (Feb. 26–May 9). Her work is also included in upcoming and currently-on-view group exhibitions: Pseudo Mythologies: Nothing is True and Everything is Alive, ArtCenter DTLA (Jan. 30–Feb. 21); Visionary New England, de Cordova Museum (Oct. 8, 2020–Mar. 14, 2021); [GLYPH], Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA (Jan. 29 –Mar. 27); A Natural History of Ruins, Pivô Arte e Pesquisa, São Paulo, Brazil (Feb. 2–Apr. 18); Stories of Resistance, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (Mar. 12–Aug. 15); and New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (Feb. 24–Aug. 29) . Her postponed solo exhibition Pigs and Poison will open at the Guangdong Times Museum on Mar. 21 and will travel to Spike Island in Ireland in 2022. A related online talk will be hosted by Arnolfini (Bristol, UK) on Feb. 17.
Peter Lunenfeld, vice chair and professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, has published “Colloidal Suspension: Immersion and the Pedagogies of Making” in Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice. The piece combines an essay on immersive, virtual, and augmented realities; a curated selection of UCLA undergraduate work in these areas; and a boundary-pushing format based on Google Sheets by renowned designer Denise Gonzales Crisp.
Lunenfeld’s article is the result of his Spring 2019 Design Futures class (DESMA 104), in which students used design ethnography, field work, and critical making to do a series of site visits, analyses, and projects about emerging immersive technologies. In the essay, Lunenfeld seeks to fill this gap and provide a pedagogical model in which students critically examine and creatively respond to the intricacies of the “hype economy” at the heart of market-driven uses of AR. He writes: “’Colloidal Suspension’ is one in a series of digital humanities-based, design-driven theoretical interventions I’ve spearheaded over the past two decades, and I was particularly excited to feature the work of our amazing DMA undergraduates.”
A still from LAUREN, a project by Lauren Lee McCarthy
Lauren Lee McCarthy, associate professor in the Department of Design Media Arts and interim associate dean for equity, diversity, and inclusion, has been named a 2021 United States Artists Fellow. The program aims to honor recipients for their past contributions to the arts, and to support their ongoing artistic and professional development.
McCarthy will exhibit an immersive installation at Ogden Contemporary Art Center in Utah. In The Changing Room, on view from Feb. 12 - May 30, McCarthy imagines an environment of smart architecture that controls emotion through a layered response of lights, sounds, and visuals. “I’m hoping it brings up the question of what’s at stake when we bring AI into public and private spaces, and the ways our emotional experiences are mediated by technology,” says McCarthy of the exhibit.
McCarthy’s new work Beyond the Breakdown, a world-building browser performance made with Tony Patrick and Grace Lee, premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
McCarthy is also co-founder—with fellow Design Media Arts professors Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams—of the UCLA Arts Conditional Studio, which has received a Getty Foundation research grant for “Art and the Internet in LA.” This project will explore the history of artists in Los Angeles who have worked with, responded to, and transformed the internet from the pivotal moment in 1969 when UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock made the first internet transmission from his laboratory to Stanford University, through the emergence of the World Wide Web, to the ubiquitous influence of the internet today. A final exhibition is expected to open in 2024 to coincide with the third iteration of Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time” initiative, focused on the intersections of art and science.
Moreton Bay fig tree in Library Park, Monrovia, CA, by Monrovia Public Library. Licensed under Creative Commons
Department of Design Media Arts professor and chair Rebeca Méndez is collaborating with artist Lia Halloran and Nobel Prize winner Kip Thorne on a book called "The Warped Side of the Universe," to be published by Norton in 2022. She has also been awarded a public art commission by Bay Area Rapid Transit, the San Francisco-area transit system, for the Irvington Station in Fremont.
Méndez is also director and founder of Counterforce Lab at UCLA, where she has partnered with Pando Populus to document and celebrate the rich, multi-ethnic history of the Maryknoll Sisters’ compound that is Pando’s new home and host of its positive impact accelerator for Los Angeles County. The site is located on Kizh Gabrielino homelands, but has for 90 years been the location of a Maryknoll Sisters convent. It served as a sanitorium for Japanese-American tuberculosis patients at a time when they could not receive treatment elsewhere in the County and is being repurposed in part today as an accelerator for social and environmental impact under the new name of Pando at Maryknoll.
Using public history, multimedia exhibition design, and environmental art, the project will interweave the Pando at Maryknoll campus’s natural and human histories in addressing contemporary environmental and social justice crises through the link of “radical commitment.” The project not only reimagines sacred space, but also the relationship between site and ceremony and ritual, creating powerful ways for participants to gather on the location and both acknowledge its deep history, wounds, and traditions of healing, and open up ways to extend care and commitment into a radically present and more just, sustainable, and connected future. It is hoped that the project will reintegrate many historical layers of sacred space and be welcoming to Native people, Japanese-Americans, the Maryknoll sisters, Pando residents, and non-human residents as well.
Rebecca Morris, professor of painting and drawing in the Department of Art, has work in two current exhibitions, New Visions: After De Keyser at David Zwirner (online) and Via Café at Tif Sigfrids in Comer, GA (through Feb. 27).
Elena Phipps, lecturer in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, will give a talk at the College Art Association’s 109th annual conference on Feb. 12 at 10 a.m. The talk, entitled “Andean Seventeenth-Century Black Uncus Worn for Corpus Christi and the Left-spun Yarn that Empowers Them,” will be followed by a panel discussion on the topic of "Peru’s Bicentenary: Identity Fractures in a Period of Transition from the colonial to the Republican Era.” A recording of the talk will be available through CAA Conference Sessions through the month of February, with registration.
[siccer], video still, 2019, Will Rawls
Choreographer, filmmaker, and writer Will Rawls is the 2020-2021 UC Regents’ Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. On Feb. 16 at 5:30 p.m. he’ll deliver the Regents’ Professor Lecture "Stopping Dancing, or “The Disnegatif"." Starting from his concept of “disnegatif”, Rawls will share thoughts on dance, disjunctive time, and black femme desire as they inform his research into stop-motion filmmaking.
An image from Alchemical created by Casey Reas and Jan St. Werner
Casey Reas, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, has co-created Alchemical alongside composer Jan St. Werner. This virtual and physical exhibition, presented in partnership with bitforms gallery, re-creates the gallery experience in a loose way and also features a completely different virtual exhibition behind the gallery. Alchemical presents the artists’ suite of videos alongside a selection of prints by Reas. The online component of this exhibition is presented in collaboration with New Art City.
Alchemical delights in the curious combination of machine and human perception. The works synthesize image comprehension through an incantation of sound and motion. Werner and Reas employ a critical process of mediation in relation to machine learning that honors the processes of transformation and combination over generative output.
Anna Sew Hoy, assistant professor in the Department of Art, has two public works on display. Her public sculpture Set Notions was installed remotely this fall and will be on view for two years. Her sculpture installation Slow Moon's Rose will open at Compound in Long Beach in February. Sew Hoy will be presenting her work as part of the 2021 Virtual Clay lecture series at NYC’s 92 St Y on March 24.
Installation image of Jennifer Steinkamp’s From, the Future, an LED display at Live! Casino & Hotel Philadelphia
Jennifer Steinkamp, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, has created From, the Future, an LED display to be permanently installed in the ceiling of a porte-cochère at Live! Casino & Hotel Philadelphia, expected to open in 2021.
As Steinkamp describes it: “The art is about waiting, something the entire world population knows since the onslaught of Covid-19. The title was also inspired by a dream where I told a scientist I was from the future and he believed me. My interpretation of the dream relates to my interest in the luminous thoughts of the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi. He clearly describes what our souls really are, beautiful, sacred, beyond time. I am fascinated by the existential impermanence of beauty. Beauty offers us a deep connection to the experience of life. The animation consists of cut flowers continuously falling from the sky, it can be seen by looking up to the ceiling. The title infers the signature on the note of a gift.”
An image from Victoria Vesna’s interactive installation Noise Aquarium, dealing with underwater pollution
Victoria Vesna, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts and director of the UCLA Art | Sci Center, will organize and curate “Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption” with guest curator, Anuradha Vikram. Art | Sci Center received support from the Getty Foundation to research and plan “Atmosphere of Sound” for the third iteration of “Pacific Standard Time,” which, when it opens in 2024, will explore the intersections between the visual arts and science. UCLA Art | Sci Center proposes to explore the relationship between sound as a post-object art form, and our shifting relationship to the world of things as necessitated by climate change. The culminating exhibition, hosted by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, will present sound and moving image artworks that respond to climate change as the condition of our times. Live performances and a print publication with interactive augmented reality elements will accompany the exhibition in 2024. The research phase of the project consists of artist residencies, panel discussions, and workshops hosted by the UCLA Art | Sci Center on the Westwood campus.
HEADER IMAGE: Anna Sew Hoy, Set Notions (2020). Photo: Bryan Zimmerman
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