Art Museums Love Controversy, Serendipity
As science museums are to theory and facts of our world, so art museums are
to representation and aesthetics. Frequently this crosses into controversy
and serendipity as seen in two exhibitions currently running at University
of California Riversideıs Sweeney Art Gallery and California of Photography.
These shows poke serious fun at manıs evolution as well as explore the
social trajectory of Darwinıs theory. The first is Intelligent Design:
Interspecies Art and the other is Americans: Portraits by Keliy
Anderson-Staley. Please give them a look.
We are all doing important work and Iım very happy to be a part of a
cultural institution that is an engaging site for deeper interactions with
audiences through its education programs. Rather than merely serving as an
extension to current exhibitions, I am given free rein to develop new and
exciting programs. A recent grant from the William Randolph Hearst
Foundation allows us open UCR ARTSblock later and longer for teens to have a
social space, access to collections, hands-on production, museum scientist
mentors, and deeper inquiry around areas of identity and society.
Intelligent Design
Interspecies Art
September 05, 2009 - February 06, 2010
Sweeney Art Gallery, Riverside CA
http://www.sweeney.ucr.edu/exhibitions/intelligentdesign/
Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art is a group exhibition of twenty
international artists exploring human interaction with animals through a
collection of provocative video installations, photographs, paintings, and
sculptures.
Artists in the exhibition collaborate with cockroaches, pigeons, dogs, cats,
ants, bears, baboons, rats, spiders, trout, and other species, which may be
domesticated, imaginary, laboratory, modeled, or wild. Curious about the
animalıs point of view, artists design their projects as a form of
conversation or inquiry about the nonhuman world. Their artwork challenges
the anthropocentric perspective of the world, placing human perception on
par with other animals. Inspired by Darwin, the environmental movement, and
species collapse, Intelligent Design envisions a paradigm shift in which
human beings are no longer the center of the Universe.
The exhibition will also stimulate discussions about the differences and
similarities of how the arts and sciences approach the world, animals as
products, animal rights, conservation, and speciesism, as a form of
prejudice against animals. Intelligent Design will be the first exhibition
in the U.S. to explore interspecies art, coming on the heels of several
exhibitions and conferences in the UK this year that explored the topic in
light of this yearıs 200-year celebration of Charles Darwinıs birth.
Americans
Portraits by Keliy Anderson-Staley
October 01, 2009 February 28, 2010
UCR California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA
http://cmp.ucr.edu/exhibitions/Anderson-Staley/
"This series of portraits raises questions about photographic representation
and the ways photography has shaped our conceptions of identity since its
earliest days. My interest lies in finding the unique visual markers of
personality and in portraying faces that reflect the diversity of
contemporary America. Each image in this project presents a face and is
titled simply with a first name. Although the heritage of the individual may
be inferred from assumptions we make about features and costumes, the
descriptive language that might have been attached to such images in the
past is deliberately absent." - Keliy Anderson-Staley
In her portrait series Americans Keliy Anderson-Staley uses the same wet
plate process made popular in the 1850s and 1860s when many believed that
photography could record and catalogue a person's racial or ethnic identity
with scientific accuracy. Far from simply critiquing 19th century
assumptions about photographic truth, Anderson-Staley practices the wet
plate technique as part of an ongoing dialogue with the legacies of early
portraiture and the photographic documentation of racial types. Americans
reflects the artist's fascination with the labor-intensive, wet plate
process as well as her interest in the expressive beauty and variety of the
human face.
Reginald Cortez Woolery
Artist, Director of Digital Studio
& Education Outreach
EMAIL: [log in to unmask]
WEB: http://www.artsblock.ucr.edu/digitalstudio
MAIL: 3824 Main Street, Riverside, CA 92501
VOICE: 951.827.4796 | FAX: 951.827.4797
BLOG: www.i215radio.blogspot.com
UCR ARTSblock
http://www.artsblock.ucr.edu
UCR/California Museum of Photography
http://www.cmp.ucr.edu
Sweeney Art Gallery
http://www.sweeney.ucr.edu
Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts
http://www.culvercenter.ucr.edu
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