Upcoming art exhibits...

Here's a couple upcoming exhibitions in the Orange County & L.A. area. Of course there are many small galleries in the area that are worth checking out, but these are some of the bigger places that you might be interested in.

Without, September 24- October 8th 2009
UCLA's New Wight Gallery at the Broad Art Center

Without is a themed exhibition of works by California MFA students curated by Meleko Mokgosi, graduate student in the UCLA Department of Art. This exhibition begins with the stipulation that all featured artists are either from or descendants of "non-Western" regions and cultures. As there is no trenchant division between "Western" and "non-Western," especially given today's transcultural context, we apply these terms in the loosest sense. Our definition of "non-Western" includes countries—specifically those in Africa, Asia and Latin/Central America—whose cultural and material histories have often been excluded within the Western canon of art history.
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1968: el culo te abrocho by Robert Jacoby, October 1- November 21st 2009
UC Irvine's UAG Main Gallery

The UAG continues its Major Work of Art Series with Roberto Jacoby’s 1968: el culo te abrocho. Jacoby is an Argentine artist whose artwork in the 1960s defined a branch of “new media” conceptual art a full decade before such aesthetic experiments were made in the Northern Hemisphere. Along with his colleagues Oscar Masotta, Eduardo Costa and Raúl Escari, Jacoby led experiments in “social oriented” Conceptualism at the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires. One of their most important interventions was Total Participation Happening, which consisted of a feature picked up by the local press about a series of Happenings that the group staged for the camera but, in fact, never took place. During Jacoby’s hiatus from the art world in the 1980s, he was the lyricist for the Argentine new wave band “Virus.” In 1968: el culo te abrocho Jacoby superimposes those lyrics upon digital reprints of archival documents related to his activities at the Instituto Di Tella. Taken together, the political posters and lyrical texts provoke us to reflect upon the utopian, poetic hopes that characterized the global cultural revolution of the 1960s and to ask what that legacy might mean to us now. Curated by Juli Carson.
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Suspended Projection by D'Ette Nogle, October 1- November 21st 2009
UC Irvine's UAG Room Gallery

Continuing its Emerging Artist Series, Room Gallery presents Suspended Projection, a multi-media installation by D´Ette Nogle. Beginning with its title, the project reflects upon the literal use of a suspended video projection as well as the psychoanalytic notion of a melancholic projection onto the past. Informed by the legacies of Conceptualism and Feminism, Nogle’s projects produce complex juxtapositions. For Suspended Projection, she presents video illustrating what she - the artist - “was-going-to-do” during several years of non-production. What viewers consequently encounter are the fits and starts of partial and/or altered photographic, sculptural, painted and printed realizations of past intimations. Building upon Rosalind Krauss’s assertion that the medium of video art is inherently narcissistic, and that video work may present the artist as cut off from history, Nogle is suspended in a past-progressive state of lack, estranged from her own imagined history of unrealized works. The viewer, in turn, moves through the intimate space of Suspended Projection, provoked to consider his or her own engagement with personal history and memory. Guest curated by Jesse Benson and Becky Koblick.
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Discarded Spider by Carlos Amorales, October 11, 2009- March 14, 2010
Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach

Coming this fall is an exhibition featuring the drawings, paintings, sculpture and video work by one of Mexico’s leading contemporary artists, Carlos Amorales. For more than 10 years, Amorales has collected images from books, magazines, the Internet and, most importantly, his own photographs of the urban environment surrounding his Mexico City home and studio. He dissects the composition of each image, isolating a shape over which he creates a digital silhouette through the technique of rotoscoping, a process closely associated with animation.

The resulting imagery—what he calls his Liquid Archive—has grown to include more than 1,500 uncanny digital drawings that include birds, geometric patterns, spider webs, men, monkeys, skulls, wolves, and a woman undergoing the transformation of pregnancy. Amorales fluidly blends the disparate imagery in myriad, unforeseen combinations that evoke both beauty and horror, the familiar and the strange.

Exhibition-related event:
Carlos Amorales Artist Talk
Sunday, October 11
2pm, free with museum admission

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Santa Ana Artwalk, every first Saturday of the month, next one on October 2nd, 2009
2nd Street Promenade

The monthly event will give you access to buy original art work from some of Southern California’s freshest, edgiest and most talented artists. It also will have open viewings of working lofts owned by artists and designers all in an award winning urban setting.