MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO ANNOUNCES
UPCOMING CERCA SERIES EXHIBITIONS
MCASD La Jolla
700 Prospect Street
La Jolla, CA 92037-4291
T: 858 454 3541
MCASD Downtown
1100 & 1001 Kettner Blvd.
(between Broadway and B Street)
San Diego, CA 92101
T: 858 454 3541
www.mcasd.org
Solo exhibitions feature new and experimental work by emerging and established artists
Beginning in July 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) continues its ongoing series of exhibitions, Cerca Series, presenting four solo exhibitions by artists Peter Simensky, Iana Quesnell, Nina Katchadourian, and Joshua Mosley.
MCASD’s Cerca Series presents new and existing artwork that confronts issues of the Southern California and Baja California regions. The series features solo exhibitions by emerging artists and experimental projects by established artists, providing a forum for artistic investigation and production in the context of the U.S.-Mexico border. The Cerca Series exhibitions are curated by MCASD Assistant Curator Lucía Sanromán.
Cerca Series: Peter Simensky > July 21 – September 23, 2007 > MCASD Downtown
New York artist Peter Simensky investigates the mechanisms by which value is assigned, accounted for, stored, and exchanged. He utilizes a strategy of appropriation that blurs the distinction between fiction and reality, art and commerce, to both participate in and critique the current overheated art market.
Under the umbrella title Neutral Capital, Simensky has developed an alternative currency system that acquires value through acquisition and trade in the art market. The artist exhanges Neutral Capital bill multiples with collectors, galleries, and other artists, whose work is purchased with this currency in economic and social operations that hinge equally on trust as on speculation. Cerca Series: Peter Simensky will present the original Neutral Capital bill collages, the Neutral Capital Collections I and II–mobile galleries-in-a-box that house artworks by prominent international artists bought with Neutral Capital–and a new video and sculpture installation created in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Tijuana for this exhibition.
Cerca Series: Iana Quesnell > September 23 – December 30, 2007 > MCASD La Jolla
Iana Quesnell examines nomadism and temporary living situations, engaging drawing as a mediating tool between her own body and her immediate surroundings. Self-referential and experientially driven, Quesnells large pencil and charcoal on paper pieces have the quality of multi-dimensional cartographies that follow her own movements through a specific territory, narrowing in on the particular coordinates where she settles for longer or shorter periods of time.
Quesnell takes a variety of viewpoints on her chosen tracking assignment, from topographical and urban maps, to carefully tape-measured floor plans and schematics of the apartments and artist’s studios she inhabits and the objects within them. For her Cerca Series, she will present several new large-scale drawings and an animation that respond to the binational experience of living in Tijuana while working at her San Diego studio. Less interested in the idea of borders and limits than in exploring the connections and permeability between delimited territories, Quesnell’s drawings for this exhibition represent a series of interlinked narratives across physical and temporal divides.
Cerca Series: Nina Katchadourian > May 11 – July 13, 2008 > MCASD Downtown
For more than 15 years, New York artist Nina Katchadourian has investigated codes of expression, language, and translation creating a body of work that emphasizes equally successful communicative exchanges as miscommunication, misreadings, and illegibility. Born in California to Finnish parents, Katchadourians work often links language and signage to heritage and lineage.
Cerca Series: Nina Katchadourian will present, among other artwork, the artist’s six-channel video piece Accent Elimination (2005), a work that explores cultural assimilation and speech as heirloom. Inspired by posters advertising “accent elimination” courses to neutralize foreign pronunciation, the artist invited her Finnish parents to participate in a learning experiment to trade each other’s speech patterns: their strong Finnish accents for their daughter’s idiomatic American and vice-versa. The multi-channel piece documents the process of unlearning and relearning the three of them underwent, revealing their struggle to hear and imitate something so familiar yet so difficult to reproduce. www.ninakatchadourian.com
Cerca Series: Joshua Mosley > May 11 – July 13, 2008 > MCASD Downtown Cerca Series: Joshua Mosley presents dread (2007), a morality play by the Pittsburgh-based artist, in which the worlds of thought, imagination, and the subconscious are conjured and easy conclusions forestalled. Currently on view at the 52nd Venice Biennale to critical acclaim, Joshua Mosley’s mixed-media computer animation and sculptural installation is a philosophical exploration of the human necessity to confront and apprehend nature. In the film, an animated photographic forest is the background against which two characters–modeled on French philosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal–hold a conversation on the relationship between God-given natural order, free will, and the human and animal conditions. www.joshuamosley.com
About MCASD
Founded in 1941, MCASD is the preeminent contemporary visual arts institution in San Diego County, with locations in downtown San Diego and La Jolla, and a collection of more than 4,000 works of art created since 1950. In January 2007, MCASD opened the new Jacobs Building and Copley Building, designed by Richard Gluckman, significantly expanding the Museum’s downtown location.
Admission is free for ages 25 and under, and is generously supported by QUALCOMM.
Image: Portable art collection and gallery in collapsible shipping crate
includes artists: Katia Bassanini, Pattie Lee Becker, Daniel Bozhkov, Terry Chatkupt, Peter Coffin, Jules Debalincourt, Erica Eyres, Jonah Freeman, Harrell Fletcher, Rashawn Griffin, Mike Henry, Beth Howe, Timothy Hutchings, Ezra Johnson, Noah Klersfeld, Jose Rodriguez Lerma, Melissa Martin, Clifford Owens, Greg Smith, Jenny Vogel, Nari Ward, Karla Wozniak, and Yuh-Shioh Wong.
