8.) Lectures/Exhibitions/Screenings

Lecture 1

Criminal Abstraction, Jennifer Garza Cuen

On the first of November, I attended a presentation by Jennifer Garza-Cuen on the work that she has been doing. She attended the highly esteemed Rhode Island School of Design and received a Masters in Art History and a MFA in Photography. As for her work, she used her photography as a means of storytelling and manages to capture so much narrative in her artwork that each piece seems to read like a story. Even her presentation was set up in a way to be narrative-like, which was an amazing experience. Much of her work focuses on the aesthetic of the classic Americana, much on the focus of the entropy that can be found around the country. One of the projects she talked about was entitled “Criminal Abstractions”. Each piece seemed to be abstract in a confusing sense, but her explanation of these pieces made the work quite interesting. Each piece was a headshot of some criminal time has forgotten, found in an abandoned police station in Detroit. They had been left for decades as the once glorious city of Detroit crumbled around them. A mugshot is fundamentally used to identify a criminal, to make their imprisonment unique and specific to the crime they perpetrated, however, with these images, they no longer serve the purpose of highlighting one man's wrongdoings but instead are left to be absorbed into the story of the institution that held them. The mugshots are now indistinguishable from a landscape or abstract work of art, symbolizing the decay of not only the picture itself, but also the decay of Detroit as a city, the institution of the justice system and the US as a whole. Her methodology was fascinating to listen to and I hope to see more work of hers in the future.


Exhibition 1

Ludic Artifacts, Austin Clinton

On September the nineteenth, I attended the BFA Thesis Exhibition in the University Galleries South which was displaying the theses of Austin Clinton and Erin Wohletz, two seniors in the BFA program here at the University of Nevada. Both students had tremendous pieces on display, however I was attracted to a piece by Austin Clinton that consisted of a chessboard with special pieces and an audio component of some kind. As I watched my friends Mitch and Emma play the chess game, I noticed that each time a piece was moved, audio would play from a hidden speaker. I asked Austin about this project of his when I got the chance and he was kind enough to explain it to me. The chess pieces were unique, as he had designed them and 3D printed them. They were each custom and the webcam hooked up above the board was intended to read each piece and call out the move being made, such as “Knight to H3.” However, he explained to me, the webcam wasn’t able to pick out any of the individual pieces during a trial run in the gallery, somewhat due to ambient lighting. So, the webcam picks up movement and plays clips from chess announcers. I was fascinated with the combination of a traditional analog game with a modern era take, almost like combining an app with real life play. The match ended in a stalemate and we moved on to the other items in the exhibition, even sampling the homebrewed beer provided at the bar. However, that piece stuck in my head and I admire the creativity of the artist.