Tired of the biochemistry/mechanical engineering/computer science culture that dominates UCSD? Revel in the artistic side of things and check out the new installation exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Art to fulfill the creative side that calculus and balancing chemistry reactions can often snatch away.

Ernesto Neto: Mother Body Emotional Densities, For Alive Temple Time Baby Son
MCASD Downtown, Jacobs Building

Famed Brazilian contemporary artist Ernesto Neto’s art piece “Mother Body Emotional Densities, for Alive Temple Time Baby Son” will once again grace the space within the Farrell Gallery. It was previously installed January 2007 but was only presented until May of the same year. The installation, permanently owned by MCASD, encapsulates Neto’s neoconcretistic style. The piece is a vibrant sensory experience — spices are collected together and suspended within fabric, forming celestial sacs, each with a colorful personality and life. The warm hues and polyp-shaped sacs create an alien space contrasting the everyday experience, while hinting at something organic and familiar. Installations usually provide only a visual stimulation, but Neto is able to spark olfactory nerves, a feat most artists don’t consider tackling. The many spices converge into a unique perfume permeating the room, gently touching the senses. This multidimensional piece can be viewed from Nov. 20 to Feb. 21.

— Maria Manalang (Contributing Writer)

Robert Irwin: Light and Space
MCASD Downtown, Jacobs Building

When you were a kid, were you told not to stare at the sun for too long? Well, here’s your chance to fight back. At this promisingly ethereal and dazzling collection of light, Robert Irwin returns to the primitive building blocks of art to create an expose that’s sure to be stunning. Without giving too much away, Irwin’s display of minimalist and geometric fluorescent patterns draws you into two binary worlds of light and dark and plays with your senses through perspectives and shadows. As an installation-based artist, Irwin teases the human eye by creating multi-dimensional pieces, and through the medium of light, his concoction of incandescent innovation is sure to please both your intellectual and aesthetic sides. Sure, it may not be the sun, but its brilliance comes at a very close second. Make sure to check out this installation from Nov. 20 to Feb. 21.

— Brittney Lu (Lifestyle Co-Editor)

Judith Barry’s Voice Off
MCASD Downtown, Jacobs Building

In an exhibition that is, in the most literal sense, dark and unconventional, Judith Barry seeks to explore the relationship between the physical and psychological. That is, in one possible interpretation of this masterpiece, the relationship between hearing intentional clear voices and distracting ourselves with meaningless background noise. We try to differentiate the insignificance of noise from the importance of voice in our lives, but there comes a time, more often than not, when we feel the need to merge the two in hopes of reducing the burden of separating the things that truly matter from those that don’t. Best known as a writer, architect and artist, Judith Barry brings to life these concepts in her exhibition “Voice Off.”As the name suggests, the exhibition consists of a large room divided into two by a curtain serving as a double-sided screen, onto which two entirely different projections and metaphoric narratives are displayed simultaneously. One cannot help but wonder what the New York artist had in mind when imagining such a thoughtful affair, which “dramatizes complex aural and vocal cues” in an intimate physical space.

— Ian Le Tran (Contributing Writer)