It’s been two months since the last University Art Gallery exhibit, and now that the paint has dried over Mark Dean Veca’s graffiti, it’s refurbishing its walls once again. Come Friday, Mandeville’s western front will house an academic year’s worth of sculpture, paint, film and photography by the 2009-10 Masters of Visual Arts graduating class. Sprawled throughout the foyer’s winding rooms, the creative energy of 13 outstanding students bumps UCSD’s art scene to new, delightfully lopsided heights.
Last April, the grad roster’s diverse work went on preliminary display at the MFA Open Studios; despite lasting a slim six hours, the event gave the public its first glimpse at UCSD’s oft-overlooked artsy side.
From that installation, the gallery has handpicked a sampling of its most promising scholars to spotlight in the year-end exhibit. And though most of the young artists haven’t mastered the technical constraints of their craft just yet, their bottomless imaginations compensate for premature virtuoso.
At the gallery’s cobalt-coated entrance, Gretchen Mercedes’ low-def silent short sets the tone for a collection that, as a whole, favors experimentation.
Mercedes places footage of a landing helicopter aside a far-off island looming closer and closer, notably created for a more meditative passerby. Like many other pieces on display ‘mdash; each given ample wall space ‘mdash; Mercedes diptych doesn’t dole out immediate aesthetic satisfaction, tempting closer exploration of its ambiguity. The MFA exhibit isn’t catering to shock-value surrealism or pop art like the Veca exhibit: instead, viewers are more inclined to strain their commercial-length attention spans to swallow the poetics of dislocation and departure (themes Mercedes palpably manipulates in her Roland Barthes-inspired short).
All the artists filling out the university gallery are represented by only a small fraction of her more extensive collection. The vibrant collection makes for a diverse collection, but avoids any intimacy and cohesion. Most individual pieces win instant allure for their sheer dissimilarity to everything else ‘mdash; but unless you’re willing to sit around and scratch your chin, the novelty fades quickly.
In the gallery’s main fluorescent-white room, framed photos hang on otherwise spotless walls. Yvonne Venegas, who also works as a freelance photographer for the New York Times, SPIN and VIBE, provides some of the room’s larger pieces: in her study of an affluent Tijuana family, Venegas examines representations of wealth (tiger cubs, opulent frocks and brimming wine glasses) in different forms. And while the subjects naturally engage the onlooker with direct eye contact, Venegas’ intentional eye plays up the fact that these are two-dimensional staged photos we’re ogling.
Along the same wall, on the other side of an open doorway, are pixilated screenshots snapped from role-playing game Second Life. Micha Cardenas’ ‘Becoming Dragon’ stills are probably the most well known of any art project on display ‘mdash; viewers might remember them from her December performance at Calit2. For 365 hours, Cardenas quarantined herself in virtual reality as online dragon avatar Azdel Slade. Though her entire stunt is reduced to three photos, their neon tints and obdurate polygons still evoke a surreal, mind-boggling experience.
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itted to the gallery’s back recesses, however, might be its most visually stunning hallmark: Kael Greco’s 16-bit video-game glitch. At the start of the popular ’80s arcade game recorded on loop, a space jet skirts around asteroids and aliens, blasting lasers at everything in sight. But then the speakers crack with an echoing tenor, the jet multiplying faster than cancer cells until the screen is paralyzed by overlapping stop-action stills.
Overstimulating us with visual repetitions and possible scenarios, Greco’s work fans out time frames like an infinite deck of cards. It’s too rapid to follow, mesmerizing in its hyperanimation.
If more refined craftsmanship is honed anywhere in the gallery, it’s in Julia Westerbeke’s sculptures. Evoking the ’70s sculptural neo-expressionism of Julian Schnabel, the bunching figures along the wall and floor transform soft materials like paint and glue into intricate fungal art.
After all is taken in, the artistic hodgepodge crammed between UAG’s bright corners has too much to say and not enough time to spell it all out ‘mdash; but thankfully, the grads’ vigor is enough to persuade a Hillcrest resident that UCSD has more than inhuman pre-meds in a spaceship library to write its science fiction.