UMCA presents exhibit by guest curator Lorne FalkDate: 4/2/2015 AMHERST – The University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) is pleased to present an exhibition guest curated by Lorne Falk, Five College visiting associate professor of contemporary art, which focuses on the recent work of thirteen full-time Art Department faculty, many of whom are new to the Amherst community: Alexis Kuhr, Young Min Moon, Shona Macdonald, Copper Frances Giloth, Susan Jahoda, Jeanette Cole, Michael Coblyn, Patricia Galvis y Assmus, Ben Jones, Jerry Kearns, Nancy LaPointe, Robin Mandel, and Jenny Vogel.
Artists in the exhibition present their work in a wide range of mediums and materials – painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, installation, and interactive multi-media.
As Lorne Falk states in his curatorial essay, “Many of the works, with all their formal, disciplinary and ideological differences, share a formal trope – a rhizomatic shape. Structurally, a rhizome has no beginning or end.
It is in a constant state of becoming, its connective web of fibers fanning out in all directions. A rhizome holds no permanent shape; its journey is specific to its space. It occurs to you that memories exist as something like a rhizome. There is also a certain poetic impulse in much of the work. You notice that the horizon line is mostly ... missing.
“The perspective that is favored is vertical and vertiginous. Your eyes experience a kind of free fall that has no bottom. Instead, you tumble into the interior spaces of (a) mind and body: the sovereignty of the self. These suspensions and interiorities might provoke a question. Where do you belong, and why? Here is more synchronicity, more reassurance, that these artists are on to something.”
Related events at the University Museum of Contemporary Art include:
• April 7, noon – 1 p.m. Robin Mandel and Jenny Vogel discuss their shared interest in the poetic potentials of everyday objects and their approach to using current technologies in their works.
• April 8, 4:30 – 5:30 p.m., Copper Giloth discusses the research and development of her mobile app “Labyrinth of Fables,” a 3D virtual reality reconstruction of a 17th century garden at Versailles. She will also demonstrate adapting the app to an Oculus Rift VR headset.
• April 14, noon to 1 p.m, painters Shona Macdonald and Alexis Kuhr present a gallery talk exploring the relationship between idea and image in their work.
• April 15, 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., Susan Jahoda of BFAMFAPhD asks, “What is a work of art in the age of $120,000 art degrees?” Based on our findings in “Artists Report Back,” we discuss how debt, rent, and precariousness affect the lives of creative people.
For more information visit umass.edu/umca.
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