Dawn Kasper Performance/Exhibits Ending/Upcoming

As part of CSULB's Visiting Artist Lecture Series, Dawn Kasper performed "clues to the meaning of life part 6: for David" at the University Theater last Wednesday evening.

Kasper, whose work has appeared in Beautiful Decay, Contemporary 21, LA Weekly and the LA Times, was one of the three artists that were featured in the UAM's exhibit "Unfiguring the Body."

That exhibit as well as the Andy Warhol exhibition "Warhol: 15 min/24 fps" and "Maya Schindler: Present Progressive" end today.

The UAM will be closed until next year when it will return in 2009 with "Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power" an exhibit of series-based colored photographs that, according to the UAM website, "reveal both local and global manifestations of power, depicting scenes in industrial, business, community, and military environments."

Also available will be a publication of the same name to which UAM director Christopher Scoates contributed.

"Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power" will run from January 22 – April 5, 2009.

UAM/LBMA Press Conference on Getty Grant

At a press conference discussing the Getty grant, LBMA director Ron Nelson expressed his excitement about the exhibition and called the UAM a “leader in visual exhibitions.”

According to UAM director Christopher Scoates, the project will bring his museum and the LBMA to the same level as other larger museums in the area. The exhibit “allows two institutions back on the world stage,” Scoates said.

The exhibit will “make Long Beach a greater center of art,” said Robert Swayze, manager of economic development for the city of Long Beach.

“It is important to use the strengths of this community to build a stronger Long Beach,” said CSULB President F. King Alexander. “We want people to come see Long Beach. We have so much talent.”

Long Beach-based artist Bill Viola also appeared at the press conference and spoke of his enthusiasm for the project.

"This is a great time for the city, the museum, the world," Viola said as he proclaimed video art the "wave of the future."

Viola also discussed the creativity involved in video art saying that anyone can pick up a camera and "push that red button and record. But not everyone can put heart and soul into it."

Gallery Talk with Maya Schindler

Letters and lanuage form an integral part of artist Maya Schindler's work as was seen during her gallery talk at the CSULB UAM on Wednesday.

Born in Israel, Schindler moved to the United States in 2000. As English became her second language, Maya said, "I decided I don't know enough about what language is."

As she displayed a photo of her work "We Love to See You Smile," Maya explained that this slogan, which she got from a McDonald's campaign, "doesn't make sense in any context."

Schindler was attracted to the McDonald's song and slogan and decided to make it into an 18-foot-long, two-foot tall work of art made of paint and resin. The piece was shown in a museum in Brooklyn, NY.

She also spoke about her 2006 work "Situation."

"For me growing up in a tense place like Israel, they talk a lot about 'the situation,' " Schindler said. "But the situation is never really defined. I like multiple possibilities."

"Dichotomy is something that defines things, and I think that is important," Schindler said.

Her installation, "I Am Political" is currently being shown in the UAM through December 14.

Alice Hutchison Interview Part I

Extensive and exciting preparations for the new exhibit "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980" will begin in two weeks, according to Alice Hutchison, curator of the CSULB UAM.

In October, the UAM and the Long Beach Art Museum were jointly awarded a $175,000 grant to research and develop an exhibit which will explore Long Beach’s central role in the early days and development of video art.

The award was one of the 15 grants that the Getty Foundation endowed to museums across Southern California to fund its $2.8-million project “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.”

After seeing the UAM’s September exhibit “art/tapes/22” LBMA’s director of collections, Sue Ann Robinson, personally invited curator Alice Hutchison to be involved with the project.

When the LBMA staff asked her, Hutchison said, she told them that the UAM had to be involved. It needed to be a partnership because she could not do it on her own.

Hutchison will be working as co-curator with the LBMA's Kathy Rae Huffman who is currently based in Europe. This means they will be using a lot of the video chat tool Skype, Hutchison said.

"This project is one of the only international features," Hutchison explains, not only because Huffman lives in Europe but also because of the history surrounding video art history.

Three decades ago, artists from around the world traveled to Long Beach to use the state-of-the art technology that was available through the CSULB art department and the LBMA, making the city an important fixture in the developing world of video art.

These pioneering videos of art are “an important piece of art history that hasn’t been told,” Hutchison said. And it is an “important acknowledgment,” she said, for both the city of Long Beach and for the UAM to be a part of this exhibit.

Dawn Kasper "Unfiguring the Body" Gallery Talk

L.A.-based artist Dawn Kasper performed her piece "Things to do when you can't sleep" to an audience of 35 people at the UAM's noontime gallery talk.

Kasper, a slight-framed woman with long, curly brown hair dressed in plaid pajama pants and a purple T-shirt, gave an emotional performance that included an organ, and an old television playing a silent Buster Keaton film.

As she manipulated the film from her seat at the organ, Kasper spoke in a free-flowing manner of her friend David, of her feelings and of her art.

Of Buster Keaton Kasper said during her performance that she "really admired him as a performer" because of Keaton's clear artistic vision.

"I am learning I have a lot to learn," Kasper said toward the end of her performance.

She left the organ seemingly crying and returned smiling and in different clothes ready to answer the audience's queries during a Q&A session that followed.

"It does affect me a great deal," Kasper said of her emotional performance.

And though she said she tries not to "dump everything" on the audience, she feels it is important to express herself.

And though she is grateful to have an audience, she said she "would probably be doing it anyway," even without one.

Kasper likened her work to a science experiment saying, "Failure's a big part of my work."

As she reflected on how her experiences shape her art, Kasper said, "I don't want to walk into a room and find my friend dead on the floor. I wanna be here with you guys. But in order to be here with you guys, I had to have experienced that."

When asked about whether or not this performance helped her insomnia, she replied, "I probably won't be able to sleep tonight."

The exhibit runs through December 14.

New Warhol exhibit opens today

The Andy Warhol exhibit "Warhol: 15 min/24 fps" opened to a crowd of about 50 people on Thursday evening at the CSULB UAM.

The exhibit features silver gelatin prints and some of the 152 Polaroid photographs that the UAM received by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

"This incredible gift from the Warhol Foundation allows us to build upon the museum's wonderful Pop Art legacy and give future scholars and students the chance to explore the creative process behind one of the 20 century's true artistic minds," said Christopher Scoates, the UAM director in a press release given earlier this year.

Scoates was also present at the opening, as well as Ilee Kaplan, the UAM associate director, and Alice Hutchison, the museum's curator.

Lecturing at the opening was CSULB art history program head, Dr. Karen Kleinfelder, who discussed the importance of the concept of identity and image to Warhol's work.

The idea behind these photographs, which include some of actor Dennis Hopper, is to "take a singular identity and fragment it."

Identity, Kleinfelder argued, should be viewed here "not as personality, but as positionality."

She quoted Roland Barthes' "Camera Lucida" at the beginning of her lecutre with excerpts relating to the notion of image, self-awareness and posing when being photographed.

Reading from her own writings, Kleinfelder said, "Andy Warhol is an artist of faces, not of heads."

"Don't think they're portraits," she told the audience of Warhol's Polaroids, "think they're portraits of photographs."

The exhibit is open through December 14.

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