MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO PRESENTS FOUR NEW SOLO EXHIBITIONS OPENING MARCH 26 AT ITS DOWNTOWN LOCATION

Local, regional and international emerging artists have been commissioned by MCASD to create new works that respond to the Museum’s downtown Jacobs Building galleries

February 10, 2010

San Diego, CA—On Friday, March 26, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego will open four new exhibitions—Ruben Ochoa, Lærke Lauta, Cerca Series: Lael Corbin, and Cerca Series: Mara De Luca—at MCASD’s downtown Jacobs Building location.

Each of these exhibitions will feature brand new commissions made specifically for MCASD by four young, emerging artists: Ruben Ochoa (Los Angeles), Lærke Lauta (Copenhagen), Lael Corbin (San Diego), and Mara De Luca (Los Angeles).

Visitors can get a sneak preview of these shows before the official public opening and interact with the artists during the Museum’s TNT (Thursday Night Thing) event on Thursday, March 25—all four artists will be present to discuss their work via informal gallery talks throughout the evening.

Ruben Ochoa
Los Angeles-based artist Ruben Ochoa creates ambitious sculptural installations that radically intervene into the existing built environment, and applies common construction materials to sculptural ends. Ochoa’s drawings, photography, public interventions, and sculptures move beyond his material’s direct references to construction and labor in order to generate critical associations between aesthetics, architecture, and class.

Ochoa was born and raised in Oceanside, and is part of a generation of Mexican-American artists who are expanding approaches to identity, culture, and politics by referencing conceptual and minimal art practices from the 1970s, as well as the city and its workforce. He has been commissioned by MCASD to create a series of site-specific sculptural pieces in the Farrell Gallery of the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Building at MCASD Downtown. This is his largest Museum exhibition to date and will consist of a 70-foot long corridor populated by 16 individual rebar and shipping pallet sculptures ranging in height from 10 to 16 feet, as well as two massive sculptural works made of accumulated reused wooden shipping pallets that will reconfigure the interior space of the gallery. This exhibition is curated by MCASD Associate Curator Lucía Sanromán

Lærke Lauta
Danish artist Laerke Lauta’s video installations have grown more lyrical and more technologically complex over time. MCASD has commissioned Lauta to develop an immersive installation specifically for the Foster Gallery at its downtown Jacobs Building. The exhibition will feature two works presented as a diptych: Floating Female and The Accident.

Floating Female is a five-channel project that maps internal and external states of consciousness. The Accident comprises two suspended projectors that slowly rotate in a round gallery to track a mysterious water journey. Lauta’s video installations draw from a northern European tradition that ascribes romantic, spiritual, and enigmatic qualities to the natural landscape. Lauta’s works are characterized by an undertone of unresolved suspense, the latent fear of a fatal event that is not directly revealed. The artist’s camera does not present a decisive moment but functions instead as an instrument of premonition and doubt. Austere light, a lush palette, and evocative sound combine in Lauta’s work to create liminal spaces that linger in memory. This exhibition is curated by MCASD Curator Dr. Robin Clark.

Cerca Series: Lael Corbin
Gelatin airplanes, topographic photography, and audio recordings are manifestations of Lael Corbin’s ongoing research into aesthetic and psychological dimensions of laboratories and workshops. The San Diego-based artist has long been drawn to laboratories because they provide a launching pad for exploration, discovery, and contemplation. In Corbin’s installations, elements commonly associated with geology, biology, and manufacturing processes merge with fragments of information, personal memory, and competing timelines. In Corbin’s laboratory, visitors encounter unfamiliar objects and processes, which may trigger questions regarding the conceptual intersections between art and scientific research.

For this Cerca Series exhibition, Corbin will turn the Strauss Gallery (at MCASD Downtown’s Jacobs Building) into a makeshift airplane hanger. In this space, visitors will find workbenches topped with partially constructed objects; large bulletin boards filled with drawings, photographs and scribbled notes; and at center, the skeleton and shell of an experimental aircraft. The exhibition is curated by MCASD Curator Dr. Robin Clark.

Cerca Series: Mara De Luca
Mara De Luca is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work investigates the visual language of abstract painting and its relationship to the promotion of political, religious, and societal ideologies. For MCASD’s ongoing Cerca Series, De Luca’s long-term project Stations (2006-2007) will be on view for the first time, together with a site-specific altarpiece triptych made for this exhibition, which responds to the changing light conditions experienced on the I-5 South during her drive from Los Angeles to San Diego, created for Fayman Gallery at 1001 Kettner.

Stations is an installation of 14 paintings loosely based on Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross (1958-64). Each painting in the series proposes a conversation between abstract fields of color, painstakingly applied in a manner reminiscent of Newman’s subtle Post-Painterly surfaces. These abstract canvases are then overlaid with illusionistic motifs taken from, among other images, Baroque painting, Hollywood studio advertisements, televised war coverage, and political propaganda. This series addresses the collision between abstraction and realism, particularly advertising images, suggesting that mass media and high art are part of a single visual universe of ideas and ideologies whose meanings are mutually dependent. This exhibition is curated by MCASD Associate Curator Lucía Sanromán.

Support

Ruben Ochoa, Laerke Lauta, Cerca Series: Lael Corbin, and Cerca Series: Mara De Luca are organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Related programs are supported by grants from The James Irvine Foundation Arts Innovation Fund, the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Fund, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

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MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO

Founded in 1941, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is the preeminent contemporary visual arts institution in San Diego County. The Museum’s collection includes more than 4,000 works of art created since 1950. In addition to presenting exhibitions by international contemporary artists, the Museum serves thousands of children and adults annually at its varied education programs, and offers a rich program of film, performance, and lectures. MCASD is a private, nonprofit organization, with 501c3 tax-exempt status; it is supported by generous contributions and grants from MCASD Members and other individuals, corporations, foundations, and government agencies. Dr. Hugh M. Davies is The David C. Copley Director at MCASD.

Institutional support for MCASD is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.

KPBS is the official media sponsor of MCASD.

www.mcasd.org