October 14 - October 21, 2021
Featuring works by: Emma Akmakdijian, Carrie Chen, Jodi Cheung, Don Edler, Leslie Foster, Berit Gilma, Yuchi Ma, Harvest Moon, Iman Person, and Isaac Ruder.
The department of Design|Media Arts at UCLA is proud to announce Perspective Slip, an exhibition of new work by second-year MFA candidates within the department. The exhibition will open to the public on Thursday, Oct 14, 2021, at the New Wight Gallery and the EDA in the Broad Art Center, UCLA. The exhibition will be on view through Oct 21, 2021. Design|Media Arts MFA is a two-year graduate program focused on developing rigorous interdisciplinary practices within the ever-expanding field of media arts. The program strives to bring together a dynamic cohort of artists, designers, and professionals from a variety of backgrounds to explore the edges of contemporary media practices.
Emma Akmakdijian will present Uninhabitable Living Room, a dysfunctional living space enveloped in earthenware sea urchins molded from estuary clay collected along Salmon River, Oregon. Participants are invited to crush a fictitious urchin with a hammer to imitate the conservation tactic of culling one species to make room for ecosystemic recovery of primary producers. The dysfunctional components of the installation including the sadistic armchair of nails and projections of seaweed DNA on curtains spotlight the concept of home as a space of disequilibrium challenged by ecological protagonists.
Carrie Chen will present Flutter 虫飞薨薨, an animated triptych installation of unfolding large-scale portraits. The figures experience shifting streams of mixed emotions in ambiguous states of being. At once fragile and vigorous, the living creatures in Flutter 虫飞薨薨 are all subject to the inevitability of change. The title also references a stanza from the ancient poetry anthology Book of Songs: 虫飞薨薨，甘与子同梦 (Translation: Insects sound like the fluttering of wings, I want to fall into a dream with you).
Jodi Cheung will present Canon, a video that explores widely used narratives in Singapore.
Don Edler will present Devil You Know, an experimental documentary video co-written by GPT-3. A hybrid of political satire and speculative horror, Devil You Know reflects the dangerous absurdity of the contemporary American media environment. Equal parts video essay staged interviews and found footage collage, Devil You Know highlights the inherent biases underlying the aesthetics of credibility - and the credibility of aesthetics - in post-truth media landscapes.
Leslie Foster will present This Haunted Land, an experimental film diptych, which lives in the space between call and response. Composed of the films Bitter Crop and Old Magic, references to Abel Meeropol’s Strange Fruit (immortalized by Billie Holiday) and Audre Lordes’ A Woman Speak, the work fills the space with aural collages while on-screen performers grapple with the materiality of their surroundings: poignant symbols for the rage, joy, and trauma of Black life.
Berit Gilma will present The planet Mars, 1 million years BC a meditation on psychic phenomena, memory, forgetting and the color blue. In a stream of consciousness, two characters are in dialogue, in disregard of time and space: a CIA remote viewer and an ancient Martian.
Yuchi Ma will present Water, a short video about personal memories, robots, feelings….
Harvest Moon will present The Tellurics Institute a project focused on building consciousness for the planet. The institute is an international consortium of scientists, academics and engineers with the intent goal of transforming the future of our civilization. With a 1000 year perspective, the institute hopes to gather valuable human data to further develop our future AI God. Your involvement is mandatory, the future of our planet depends on distilling our collective intentions for the future into an all-powerful higher being. With this power, any decision (or indecision) you make today will transform humanity for the rest of existence.
Iman Person will present New Air, a reflection on interspecies communication through the mediumship of wind, movement, video, and sonic exploration. The piece includes audio recordings of wind harps erected in Satwiwa national park, poetry, and live wind data from four locations that are tied to the artist’s identity: West Africa, her mother's home country of Jamaica, Atlanta, Georgia, and Los Angeles, California. Exploring the concept of air as a messenger and as a consolation, the work examines whether landscapes contain a language within their flora and whether its voice is held by the wind that travels through it.
Isaac Ruder will present Wishing Well, a single channel video installation that follows a specimen encased in green concrete as it matures, labors, and expires in an everlasting loop.