Tuesday, October 21, 1997
One gallery, 14 students, a nation of art
ART UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery curators look far and wide for the
talent behind the Wight Biennial Exhibit
By Jammie Salagubang
Daily Bruin Contributor
They were on a quest. They packed, shipped, arranged and
oversaw. And finally, they had … the Wight stuff.
UCLA graduate students who curated the first Wight Biennial
Exhibit traveled to several graduate schools throughout the United
States to handpick the works of art. Each curator chose pieces in
areas of his or her special interest. As a result, the exhibit
represents nearly all areas of art.
"The Biennial defines what is going on in the art world, what’s
going on in the minds of UCLA students, and also what sort of ideas
are being circulated on a larger level and at grad schools," says
Evan Holloway, a member of the Wight Gallery board of directors who
curated the exhibit.
The Wight Biennial Exhibit features works by 14 masters of fine
arts graduate students, one of whom is Samara Caughey from USC.
Films largely influenced her work, especially those of American pop
culture.
"I believe that much of this collective knowledge gained through
film and media is very much in control of how we act and respond.
They kind of set up the systems of who we’re supposed to be,"
Caughey says. "So my idea is to take more control over the media by
actually personalizing it and twisting it to my own desires."
In her piece "Grand National," Caughey constructed the race
track from the movie "National Velvet." Of course, this is no
ordinary race track. For one, it’s on stilts. For another, it’s
tiny.
"To get the best sense of Samara’s work you have to get down on
your knees. It makes you physically do something to interact with
it," comments Jacqueline Cooper, another curator who is also the
exhibition coordinator.
Some people might find her subject matter of popular films a
little odd. Indeed, she can draw some amazing conclusions about the
similarities between "St. Elmo’s Fire" and "2001: A Space Odyssey."
(Think "rooms.") However, it all makes perfect sense to
Caughey.
"It’s the viewer that finds the interpretation in the films that
can make it either a piece of trash or a brilliant work," Caughey
says. "As a viewer, you can watch any piece of trash and find an
epiphany in it."
Holloway says "Grand National" is a prime example of such
seemingly contradictory viewpoints. It’s a familiar interpretation
from the movie, but rendered strange in real life.
"By doing all these simultaneous different things, ("Grand
National" is) able to worm itself into a spot that a lot of things
just can’t get at," Holloway says.
Won Ju Lim, a graduate student at the Pasadena Art Center, is
another artist whose views are on display. Her work, "Suburban
Dream," is a collection of houses made out of foam core according
to floor plans taken from Home Depot catalogues.
"This piece has many layers, but one of them is definitely about
pre-fabricated desires. I’m disgusted by them, but at the same time
there is a desire in me to own one of these homes. I think at some
level there’s this kind of desire in everybody," Lim says.
According to Lim, it’s not only a desire for real estate, but
also a sexual desire. One wall of the display has all the house
models; the other wall has the titles for them, 10 of which sound
like porn film titles, for example, "Queen Anne’s Interior," and
"Indoor and Outdoor Stimulation."
Lim says she hoped the model would look like several towns, as
the houses are discreetly separated by color. However, she also
discovered that the floor plans resemble circuit boards when
grouped together.
"I’m really interested in a nomadic interior, an interior that
keeps moving. I think circuit boards work this way. If you could
make them 3-D, they would look like mazes that keep going, that
lead from one interior to another," Lim explains. "The town looks
like a circuit board that really leads you to a dead end and/or to
nowhere."
Lim says she believes the circuit board theory also parallels
her thoughts on prefabricated desires: It keeps going, but it leads
nowhere. She says she hopes the audience experiences this sense of
being lost.
"I think Won Ju’s work is really about urban despair in that you
can’t own any of these houses from the plans that you buy at Home
Depot and that you can’t really build them anyway. And they all
pretty much look the same," Cooper says.
The Wight Biennial Exhibit is more than art, though. Cooper says
she hopes the exhibit will give undergraduate students some options
about what to do after they have completed undergraduate school,
what other graduate schools have to offer and what their different
strengths are.
"In a more general sense, it will give students the idea that if
people get together, they can make something like this happen,"
Cooper says. "We’ve pretty much done everything that’s never been
done before."
ART: The Wight Biennial Exhibit is on display through Nov. 21 at
the Wight Gallery on campus. Admission is free. For more
information call (310) 825-3281.
(top) "Suburban Dream," created by Won Ju Lim from the Art
Center College of Design. (left) "Hole Part 2," a work by Guillermo
Atilano Creus, a Columbia University student; oil on canvas. (far
left) "Lies," rendered by Carol Irving, a student at Yale
University.
GENEVIEVE LIANG/Daily Bruin
"Lies", done by Carol Irving a student at Yale.
GENEVIEVE LIANG/Daily Bruin
"Suburban Dream" done by Won Ju Lim from the Art Center College
of Design.