The Curated Object

Exhibitions Santa Barbara. Portrait of an Archive: Selections from the Architecture & Design Collection and First Person. The University Art Museum at the University of California Santa Barbara. The Curated Object: International Decorative Arts...

Portrait of an Archive: Selections from the Architecture & Design Collection
October 17, 2007 - May 16, 2008

Portrait of an Archive highlights the work of ten designers who have helped to alter the face of twentieth-century California. Including personal portraits and professional materials, the exhibition presents a range of items from designs for prefabricated housing to roadside service stations. The artifacts are all drawn from the University Art Museum’s Architecture & Design Collection (ADC), the leading design archives in Southern California. Just as the ADC explores the diversity of the built environment through its historic collections, Portrait of an Archive provide insights into the impact that technology, consumption, and fantasy have played in shaping our contemporary landscape. Mirroring the rich variety of the ADC’s holdings, Portrait of an Archive features original drawings, photographs, models, furniture, and video footage work by noted designers Gregory Ain (1908-1988), Albert Frey (1903-1998), Edward A. Killingsworth (1917-2004), Paul Lászlò (1900-1993), Cliff May (1908-1989), Lutah Maria Riggs (1896-1984), R.M. Schindler (1887-1953), Whitney R. Smith (1911-2002), Robert B. Stacy-Judd (1884-1975), and Kem Weber (1889-1963). First Person gathers a selection of contemporary art objects which take the identity of artist as their subject.  While portraits often use mimesis to represent the sitter, these objects employ language, abstraction, and symbolism to convey identity and include video, drawings, and photographs.  John Coplans dissects his naked body through a series of sequential black-and-white images, revealing many parts and much detail, but hot his face and eyes.  At a glance, Gillian Wearing’s photographs appear as conventional family portraits; yet it is the artist posing as her grandparents (see images below).

Elaborate makeup and exacting clothing challenge viewers to register the images’ true sitter. Other works, by Jonathan Borofsky and Jim Shaw draw their imagery from the subconscious world of dreams. Mona Hatoum and Glenn Ligon linguistically use the first person. A looping video seems to trap Hatoum in time, while Ligon effectively travels back in history through the guise of slave narratives. These varied approaches to self-representation assert the makers’ identities, even as they question objectivity. For more information please visit: The University Art Museum at the University of California Santa Barbara -Joanne Molina

Exhibitions Santa Barbara. Gritty Brits: New London Architecture. The University Art Museum at the University of California Santa Barbara. The Curated Object: International Decorative Arts Exhibitions

FAT: Blue House, Bethnal Green, London, 1998-2002
Digital image: courtesy of Morley von Sternberg.

Gritty Brits: New London Architecture
November 1, 2007 - January 20, 2008

An exploration of emerging architectural thinking and practice in London will be on view at the Univeristy Art Musuem at UC Santa Barbara form November 1, 2007 through January 20, 2008. Gritty Brits: New London Architecture examines the works of six young, London-based architectural firms: Adjaye/Associates, Caruso St John Architects, FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste), Níall McLaughlin Architects, muf, and Sergison Bates architects. These practices operate in and about the city’s post-industrial East End and their work responds to the vibrant diversity of contemporary culture and urban life.

“We are delighted to be the sole West Coast venue for this timely exhibition,” notes Kathryn Kanjo, director of UAM.  “The work draws its currency from the complementary relationship between London’s “gritty” reality and the architects’ celebration of that condition.”

This “new London” architecture manifests itself in areas that were previously neglected by developers and planners.  Clients range from the well-to-do to the less privileged.  Some projects are homes for celebrities and art collectors, others provide housing for low-income residents and recent immigrants.

“The collective result of the architects’ creations is that as new social groups and situations emerge, new juxtapositions and cultural layers manifest themselves within the city,” says Raymund Ryan, Carnegie Museum of Art curator of architecture and organizer of the exhibition.  “These new architects allow the city and its architecture to inform one another, and their projects analyze and reinforce the urban experience through use of color, light, texture, and ornament.”

The awnings of market stalls inspired the vivid colors and striations of Adjaye/Associates’ Idea Store Whitechapel, where patrons from many racial and economic backgrounds participate in library activities and classes, use the Internet, and dine in the upper- level cafe.

Rethinking our concept of landscape, FAT proposes Custom Car Rococo, a contemporary park-and-ride in Regent’s Park, a vast urban park first constructed in 1810. Alongside some architecturally undistinguished high-rise towers in Tilbury, the architectural firm muf collaborated with teenage girls to organize a barren site near public housing for horseback riding and other community activities

London’s canals now host a growing number of floating homes. Níall McLaughlin’s Houseboat uses environmental technologies for warmth and cooling and, unlike a traditional barge, is made of glass and reveals the lives of its inhabitants. The iridescent and striped facades of McLaughlin’s housing at Silvertown reinterpret aspects of that postindustrial terrain.

For more information please visit: The University Art Museum at the University of California Santa Barbara

-Joanne Molina