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Incubate: Julia Paull and Joseph R Mendelson III, Ph.D. Daily: Monday 03/19/2012 - Wednesday 04/04/2012; 10:00 PM - 5:00 PM STATION & 3001 Gallery Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) 3001 S. Flower Street Los Angeles CA 90007 Julia Paull and Joseph R Mendelson III, Ph.D. Closing reception and artist's talk: Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 from 8:00–10:00 pm Incubate. The word is derived from the Latin incuabre (=to lie) but modern usage has it applied more towards the concepts of nurturing development of eggs or young, or even ideas. Over the last two years Joseph R Mendelson III, Ph.D., Herpetologist and Curator of Herpetology, Zoo Atlanta and Julia Paull, artist and Roski School faculty have been incubating about the complicated circumstances that now surround endangered species and programs that breed these endangered species in captivity. Incubate is an interdisciplinary experiment combining documents, and the writing of Mendelson with photographs by Paull, Together Mendelson and Paull have traveled to conservation breeding programs and facilities at The Costa Rican Amphibian Research Center in Costa Rica, the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center in Panama, and Wikiri Foundation in Quito, Ecuador. Captive at Wikiri were a few newly discovered frog species that have yet to be named. As it happens herpetologists sometimes discover new species in Natural History Museums that are extinct, yet still unnamed. Incorporated into the thesis of this exhibition is the discovery of new species and the context in which amphibians exist. Julia Paull’s photographs are made possible by a University of Southern California Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences Grant. Image: Julia Paull, Tadpole, Atelopus sp (New Species), 2012, 26.5 x 40 inches, inkjet print SUPERHIGHWAY: Chris Fernandez, Chris Hanke, & Quinn Singer Daily: Tuesday 03/20/2012 - Sunday 04/01/2012; 10:00 AM - 8:00 PM Superhighway University Gateway 3335 S. Figueroa Street Los Angeles CA 90007 Abstracting Light On view in Superhighway from March 20–April 1 is a loop of student work. Chris Fernandez, Infernal Underground, 2011 Chris Hanke, One for Each of Us, 2011 Quinn Singer, In a Crystal Rain Power Outage, 2011 Superhighway is located just inside the main entrance of the recently completed University Gateway apartment building, at Figueroa and Jefferson. The space is open from 10 am to 8 pm every day. Image: Quinn Singer, still from In a Crystal Rain Power Outage. Senior Seminar Exhibition: Indigenous to Somewhere Daily: Monday 04/02/2012 - Friday 04/13/2012; 8:30 AM - 7:00 PM University Park Campus Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery Watt Hall, Ground Floor The graduating Roski School of Fine Arts class of 2012 is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, indigenous to somewhere. This group exhibition in the Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery explores the culminating ideas of nine seniors in their final months of undergraduate art school. Representing the end of one stage and the move into another, the title "indigenous to somewhere" suggests the elasticity of art—in form, origin, and creation—throughout time and space. Participating in the exhibition are Zachary Aronson, Kelsey Bullock, Elvira Clemente, Elizabeth Chabot, June Choi, Gabrielle Exner, Deborah Ho, Victoria Le, and Michael Salvatore. These works are characterized by their quest for self-understanding and identification, be it through a close-up examination of traditional portraiture or through the alteration of environment. On a more direct level of representation, Vicky Le explores the creation of individual identity through her paintings and photographs that associate with social, economic, and fashion subcultures. The painting included in this show highlights the style, behavior, and interaction between a crowd commonly seen at contemporary fine art openings. Elizabeth Chabot produces large oil paintings of empowered women confronting the conservative stereotype of a female’s place within society by instilling feminist attitudes through gesture and body language. June Choi’s work incorporates personal experiences that she had in her childhood that she wishes to bring back to the present to commemorate it through stylized and dimensionless aesthetics; her work responds to a time when she was an outcast—a black sheep in school. Zachary Aronson creates large-scale drawings on wood planks that present a contemporary perspective on portraiture, reinterpreting classical subject matter, materials, and techniques for a post-photographic digital age. The show explores identity through a transfiguration of symbolism that redefines norms of signification through means of stylization or found objects. Elvira Clemente’s drawings question the symbolism and ideas of virtue and how they are used to control women’s image. Kelsey Bullock has included two 18”x24” figurative surrealist oil paintings on wood panels that explore the juxtaposition between the living human body and the artificiality of dolls and other humanoid forms. Michael Kiyoshi Salvatore fabricates totemic clay forms that explore the core mechanics of human behavior by deconstructing and transcending popular, restrictive and arbitrary modes of social identification, revealing our universal singularity. Deborah Ho creates recycled accumulations of paintings, drawings, and sculpture that explore the relations between subconscious and mundane human expression. In her installation, she also examines the anarchic economies of giving and sacrifice within identity that are necessary with the inundation of mass culture. Gabrielle Exner engages with outsider art aesthetics combined with an accumulation and gathering strategy to create large installations that allow the experience of a new environment. As the final academic project for the graduating group, the students of FA 450: Fine Arts Senior Seminar have re-examined the origins and changes of their artistic practices during their past years in the Roski school to present a contemplation of the future to come. Please join them in celebration of the end of one era and the beginning of an exciting unknown at their opening reception, held in the Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery in Watt Hall on Thursday, April 5, 5-7 pm. The student contributors to this group exhibition are soon-to-be graduates of the USC Roski School of Fine Arts undergraduate program enrolled in FA 450: Senior Seminar. Chris Coy: Thesis Exhibition Daily: Wednesday 04/04/2012 - Saturday 04/07/2012; 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM University Park Campus Graduate Fine Arts Building Gayle & Ed Roski MFA Gallery Reception: Friday, April 6th, 9:00 pm-11:59 pm BARNRAZER preview @ Midnight Graduate Lecture Series: Lincoln Tobier Wednesday 04/04/2012: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM Lecture Forum Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) 3001 S. Flower Street Los Angeles CA 90007 Lincoln Tobier’s projects embrace a variety of media including sculpture, photography, painting, video, radio, and theater. Much of his work explores the limitations of the public sphere and communication. His recent play The Orchestra Pit Theory By Roger Ailes has been presented in Los Angeles and Leipzig and will be staged in London this summer. He has had solo exhibitions at Martos Gallery in New York, Daniel Hug Gallery in Los Angeles, the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York, Galerie Maisonneuve in Paris, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others, and been included in group exhibitions at such institutions as the MoCA, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig, the Venice Biennale; the MAK Center Los Angeles, and the Institute for Contemporary Art. London. Works by Mitchell Syrop Daily: Monday 04/09/2012 - Wednesday 04/25/2012; 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM 3001 Gallery Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) 3001 S. Flower St. Los Angeles CA 90007 Reception: Friday, April 20, 2012, 7:00-9:00 PM 3001 Gallery at USC Roski School of Fine Arts is proud to present an exhibition of works by Mitchell Syrop, from April 9th through 25th, 2012 The ambiguities of language and the visual properties of its presentation have long been central concerns for Mitchell Syrop. This presentation will feature works from the “In the Can” series (1986-90) that have been exhibited at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles. Syrop pairs photographs of microscopic organic structures with familiar slogans drawn from the culture at large. Conditioned to the notion that a caption sheds light on the accompanying image, one tries at first to attach meaning. Both the imagery and text in these works remain ambiguous and seemingly interchangeable. The connections expose the many shifting meanings that language and imagery can carry. While apparently confrontational, the works also provoke introspection. Syrop is represented by Thomas Solomon Gallery in Los Angeles. Syrop's work has been widely exhibited in America and throughout Europe, Asia, and Australia. The artist has participated in a number of significant group exhibitions including Forest of Signs, MOCA, Los Angeles (1989). His work is represented in prominent collections, including MOCA, Los Angeles, LACMA, ICP NYC, San Diego Museum of Art, and the Orange County Museum of Art. These Things: An Exhibition by Brandon Wesley Daily: Monday 04/09/2012 - Friday 04/27/2012; 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM STATION Gallery Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) 3001 S. Flower Street Los Angeles CA 90007 Reception: Friday, April 20th, 7–9 pm A Statement By Brandon Jardine What these things have in common is that they have all passed through me. I hold no stake in claims of having created anything new. These representations exist apart from me, all made from things that already were. Borrowing heavily from the objects and spaces around me, they are documents of a chance encounter between my subjectivity and the reality of the world in which it exists. “Who is Brandon Wesley?”—a question I inescapably find myself returning to time and time again ever since the day I made him up. Time and time again I think I’ve got it all figured out, but then some time has passed and what I thought I knew proves no longer relevant. I am Brandon Wesley, among so many other things. If asked to answer conclusively, I’d probably say “He’s the gay one,” but these things together form a document which when read bears answer as good as any. Just beneath their material surface lie insights to who he is, or once was, or maybe, rather, who he wants to be. On "These Things" By Santi Vernetti The discursive space These Things creates demands that we abandon our preconceived notions of what constitutes a photographic exhibition. Gestures investigative of duration and light, the very keystone elements of the medium, have produced these things which simultaneously function to occupy the physical space of exhibition but also to intimate a much larger portrait. These things focus our attention to a multiplicity of perceptual and physical points of entry and sites of reception, commanding participation to the very spot from which one chooses to view the work while still allowing the viewer an appropriate freedom with which to explore the material diversity of the exhibition’s components and their respective physical properties. The penetrability of the exhibition’s many works (with regards to light) run the physical gamut—transparent glass, translucent transparencies, opaque items of a seemingly personal nature, digital projections of light itself. Graduate Lecture Series: Hamza Walker (CANCELLED) Wednesday 04/11/2012: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM Lecture Forum Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) 3001 S. Flower Street Los Angeles CA 90007 Hamza Walker is the Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. He is also on the faculty of The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He has written for Trans, New Art Examiner, Parkett, and Artforum, and penned catalogue essays on Darren Almond, Rebecca Morris, Giovanni Anselmo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Moshekwa Langa, and Katharina Grosse. He organized the first United States exhibition of works by Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, in 2011. Past curatorial projects at the Renaissance Society include a solo exhibition of photographs by Chicago-based artist Anna Shteynshleyger (2010); "Several Silences" (2009); "Black Is, Black Ain't" (2008); "Katerina Seda" (2008); "Meanwhile, in Baghdad" (2007); "All the Pretty Corpses" (2005); "A Perfect Union...More or Less" (2004); and "New Video, New Europe" (2004). He is the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant, the 2005 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement, and, in 2010, he received the prestigious Ordway Prize. Radio Break Daily: Saturday 04/14/2012 - Friday 04/27/2012; All day Off Campus... Union Station, La Serenata Restaurant, MacArthur Park, El Pueblo LACE, 6020 Wilshire Los Angeles CA Radio Break: Two Weekends of Artists’ Low-Power Radio Transmissions & Live Performances Presented by USC Roski School of Fine Art’s MA Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere Program, class of 2012 Radio Break is an exhibition on the air, presenting twelve artworks in locations throughout Los Angeles conveyed through low-power radio transmissions during two weeks and live events held on two consecutive weekends. Radio Break connects participants with the ambient sounds of the city, inviting them to tune in to its history, noise, narratives, and music. A way-finding map and interactive website accompany the exhibition and provide details about the projects and their locations. Listed below is the exhibition schedule; for more information see http://radio-break.com. SATURDAY, APRIL 14th 4–6pm Union Station, 800 N. Alameda Street Alyce Santoro’s Between Stations explores how cities are aurally experienced by turning New York City subway sounds into music that contrasts with the movements of Los Angeles’s transportation hub. 6–9pm OPENING EVENT AND RECEPTION La Serenata Restaurant, 1842 E. 1st Street Brandon LaBelle and collaborators recorded their own versions of conversations overheard on the streets of Santiago de Chile to create The Echo Project. Lincoln Tobier revisits The Orchestra Pit Theory by Roger Ailes, a theatrical work based on a single Fox News transcript exploring the genre of the news broadcast, affect, and subjectivity. Coinciding with the transmissions will be a reception with light refreshments. --- SUNDAY, APRIL 15th 10am–2pm MacArthur Park, Wilshire Boulevard and S. Park View Street Brendan Threadgill reconfigures the Los Angeles Times “Crime Map” with Incident Reports 2007–2011 (MacArthur Park Homicides), using sound to mark the sites of lives lost throughout the city. Arnoldo Vargas’s Triggernometry and the Cartography of Sound gives voice to Wilmington residents by broadcasting their distant concerns to Angelenos and the city at a remove. This is a preview of weeks’ worth of recording to be presented in full at a listening event on Saturday, April 21st at Slanguage Studio in Wilmington. 10am–2pm El Pueblo, 125 Paseo De La Plaza Pedro Reyes sources digital voice messages from Angelenos, making public the private lives of anonymous city residents with the work VMR: Voice Mail Radio. --- SATURDAY, APRIL 21st All events at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Boulevard 1–4pm Lucy Raven presents the audio play Con Air 2, a record of actual events—the artists’ friends at play, communicating via walkie-talkie—exhibited within a fictionalized setting. 1–5pm LIVE PERFORMANCE Vanessa Place reads Full Audio Transcripts, a selection from the logs of the Federal Aviation Administration, North American Aerospace Defense Command, and American Airlines on September 11, 2001, a narrative of the tragedy before comprehension or memorialization. 5 –6pm LIVE PERFORMANCE 2 Headed Dog (Jim Turner, Mark Fite, and Dave "Gruber" Allen) presents Clowntown City Limits, a radio play telling the desperate tale of out-of-work hobo clowns. Viewers can listen to the broadcast and interact with two of the characters. --- SUNDAY, APRIL 22nd *All events at 6020 WILSHIRE* (The new ForYourArt space), 6020 Wilshire Boulevard** 2–6pm Richard T. Walker intervenes into Los Angeles's visual and radiophonic space, telling the absurdist tale of one man’s quest to find the words to speak when language no longer suffices in between distance and a mountain. 3–5 pm Elana Mann asks us to tune into the concerns of Angelenos affected by the financial crisis by listening to the carols of the People’s Microphony Camerata. 6–9pm LIVE PERFORMANCE and RECEPTION David Schafer's Cage Mix: Static Age reconceives a selection of John Cage’s compositions through live electronic and processed improvisation performed alongside an accompanying installation. A reception will follow Schafer's performance. A listening station with all projects will be at 6020 Wilshire through April 27th. Senior Seminar Exhibition: Playhouse Monsoon Daily: Monday 04/16/2012 - Monday 04/30/2012; 8:30 AM - 7:00 PM University Park Campus Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery Watt Hall, Ground Floor Kara-Leigh Huse, Branden Marcus, Nihura Montiel, Beatrice Poon, Junxian Poon, Edwin Rodriguez, Mariel Williams, Rita Yeung, Hye You Reception: Thursday, April 19th, 5–7 pm SUPERHIGHWAY: Rachelle Bautista-Meeks and Biz Wallace Daily: Monday 04/16/2012 - Monday 04/30/2012; 10:00 AM - 8:00 PM Superhighway 3335 S. Figueroa Street Los Angeles CA 90007 On view in Superhighway from April 16–30 is a loop of student work. Rachelle Bautista-Meeks, Ritual with Hands, 2011 Biz Wallace, Coven, 2011 Superhighway is located just inside the main entrance of the recently completed University Gateway apartment building, at Figueroa and Jefferson. The space is open from 10 am to 8 pm every day. Image: Rachelle Bautista-Meeks, still from Ritual with Hands, 2011 Graduate Lecture Series: John Knight Wednesday 04/18/2012: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM Lecture Forum Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) 3001 S. Flower Street Los Angeles CA 90007 The work of John Knight can be said to engage institutional critique in a particularly generative way. Through nuanced intercessions into the mechanisms of display and visual communication, his practice unpacks conventions and codes that give art its value, using art as a platform to reflect upon larger political and economic systems. Working "in situ," each project is based on analysis and intervention specific to the venue at hand; its aesthetic logic takes its cues from the structure of that of the gallery, museum, or other exhibition venue. Recent projects include participation in the MAK Center’s How Many Billboards? (2010), and exhibitions at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2009); Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2009); Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin (2009); Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (2008); and Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castelló (2008). Annual Undergraduate Exhibition: The One & The Many Daily: Tuesday 04/24/2012 - Friday 05/11/2012; 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM University Park Campus USC Fisher Museum of Art The One & The Many, the 2012 edition of the Roski School of Fine Arts Annual Undergraduate Exhibition, showcases the most outstanding work made by Roski students during the past academic year. This year, the Dean of the USC Roski School of Fine Arts, Rochelle Steiner, with USC Roski School faculty members Jennifer West and Chris Barnard, co-curated the exhibition, which includes work in painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, ceramics, sculpture, video and graphic design. All of these areas of emphasis are taught at the Roski School by a faculty of professional, practicing artists and designers. Students are encouraged to articulate their ideas in any media, and the works of art on display here represent the rich and varied approaches to contemporary art-making — from traditional representation to conceptually based projects. Open Tuesday–Friday, noon–5pm Reception & award ceremony: Tuesday, May 1, 5–7pm Special hours L.A. Times Festival of Books: Sat., April 21 & Sun., April 22, noon–4pm Commencement Day: Friday, May 11, 10am–2pm Erin Foley's MFA Thesis Exhibition: Six paintings and one whip Daily: Wednesday 04/25/2012 - Saturday 04/28/2012; 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM Ed & Gayle Roski MFA Gallery 3001 S. Flower Street Los Angeles CA 90007 Reception: April 26th, 2012, 6–9pm Performance at 8pm Graduate Lecture Series: Maggie Nelson Wednesday 04/25/2012: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM Lecture Forum Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) 3001 S. Flower Street Los Angeles CA 90007 Maggie Nelson is the author of four books of nonfiction: a critically acclaimed work of art and cultural criticism, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011) – an examination of the “full-fledged assault on the barriers between art and life that much 20th-century art worked so hard to perform;” a meditation on the color blue, Bluets (2009); a critical study of poetry and painting, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007); and an autobiographical book about sexual violence and media spectacle, The Red Parts: A Memoir (2007). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes (2007); Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of Memoir), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001; finalist, the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award). Her poetry has been widely anthologized, and included in The Best American Poetry series. Nelson is a member of the CalArts MFA Writing Program faculty. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Artforum, Bookforum, and Cabinet.