It’s easy for the nontechnical communities at UCSD to get buried underneath the blinding Scripps reputation and hottest-for-science hype – but dig a little deeper, and it doesn’t take long to make out the bustling anthills that are the art, film, theater, music and literature departments. There are weekly student art shows at the bottom of Mandeville Center, strings of inspiring readings through the New Writing Series and countless free performances from budding musicians on campus, a dash of color for our often-bleak campus and a rejuvinating unscrewing of our hard-set collegiate jaws.
Hoping to bathe one particularly fascinating niche of this underground creative community in the light it deserves, the UCSD visual arts department presents Open Studios – the first (hopefully annual) show of its kind, a peek into the work spaces of over 50 grad students working toward their MFAs. The somewhat epic event will showcase both intensive graduating collections and the ongoing musings of recent arrivals, all in time to let recruits experience the global gathering of students they could join and the generally more theoretical, conceptual direction that our art department chooses to take.
Social and political commentary dominate the energetic tornado of art baring itself to the public eye this Friday – of the still, filmed and live variety. Let yourself in on UCSD’s solemnity-veiled little secret: our artists can run circles around every petri dish in the whole damn place
What do you do when, as a liberal young artist, your father adamantly demands in his will that you inherit every model in his 17-piece gun collection? For Glenna Jennings, a first-year grad student, the answer came simply: embark on a photographic voyage through the paradoxical tunnels between woman and weapon, father and daughter, freedom and destruction, food and communication. Her work-in-progress exhibit includes four nearly finished images under “”Inheritance”” and four unfinished images under “”Narratives of Consumption,”” all supplemented by research and sketched ideas still driving the projects. The original gun/food photo (right), featuring Jennings herself, will be joined by similarly themed images of her mom, boss and a best friend.
The future of Jennings’ work makes its present that much more exciting: She plans to assay the connotations of women posing with guns, seek out communities of women who do hunt and incorporate her father’s old slides into the project. And, after all’s said and done, this realist plans to go out with a bang – making the departure of the guns from her life a finale for the artistic experience they’ve provided.
At the end of the day, it’s nearly impossible to remember all the spaces we’ve obliviously made and shared with strangers and objects we’ve passed and lingered near. When mixed-media first-year Susy Bielak looked down from her workplace, separated from the streetside only by a wall of glass, she began a surveillance project that would be called “”Aerial Gaze,”” a collaged, drawn, painted and printed exploration of the spacial goings-on beneath the wall. Her renderings – which “”play off points of contact and points of disconnect”” – transcend the limitations of two-dimensional photography and the tunnel vision of daily life, slapping us suddenly aware of our personal and social positioning.
But only one piece from “”Aerial Gaze”” will be on studio display this Friday (“”Quartet #6,”” right), as Bielak’s focus has shifted to the more specific symbolism of both the handshake – particularly the political handshake – and the bouquet of flowers, the former presented in intensive graphite drawings and the latter in ink, based off a total of five to seven photographs. The project is based on an idea developed at the turn of the century called the “”Language of Sentiment in Flowers,”” which Bielak ties to the political handshake in their coinciding “”decorum and euphemism.””
