Visual Worlds, Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis - Andrea Fraser, the GALA committee, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, ®™Ark, Allan Sekula

Visual Worlds
Andrea Fraser, the GALA committee, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, ®™Ark, Allan Sekula
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
September 28 – October 31, 2001

The Visual Worlds exhibition features the work of Andrea Fraser, the GALA committee, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, ®™Ark, and Allan Sekula, investigating shifting concepts of visuality in the age of globalization and digitization. The exhibition encompasses works in photography, slide projection, video/performance, web-sites, and other conceptually based image/text explorations. Utilizing strategies of viral infiltration, parody, sabotage, and documentation, the works included in Visual Worlds, question the increasingly convoluted relationships between media and society, as they seek to undermine the omnipresence and seamlessness of mainstream media news, television and Hollywood.

Included in the exhibition are selections from Mary Kelly's mea culpa series in which thousands of pounds of laundry have been washed and dried to create wave-like intaglio prints composed of fragile dryer lint. The ocean-like swaths of lint are imprinted with text and are presented in photographic linear configurations. The texts, though fictitiously composed by Kelly, are derived from fragments of politically motivated atrocities including recent investigations by the International War Crimes Tribunal. Conveyed through the voice of an anonymous female protagonist, the texts reference atrocities associated with Vietnam in the 1970’s and the apartheid-crimes of South Africa under investigation by the Truth and Reconciliation Act.

The exhibition also includes Shirin Neshat’s powerful and poetic photographs, in which contemporary female Muslim identity is examined in relationship to the culture of the media photograph and the history of the photographic portrait. Also on view will be "Waiting for Tear Gas," a slide-installation project by Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer, Allan Sekula, incorporating documentation of the recent World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Washington. Sekula’s poster-like piece "Dear Bill Gates" incorporating an image of the artist swimming in front of Microsoft executive Bill Gates’ sprawling estate, along with a letter from the artist addressed to Bill Gates, will also be on view.

Visual Worlds is also feature a series of works created by the GALA Committee, a collaborative artist/activist/product design team who have created ironic insertions into the Prime Time television program Melrose Place over a period of years. The GALA committee, consisting of over 100 artist/participants succeeded at producing over 100 art objects that actually appeared in many filmed episodes of the Melrose Place program. The objects developed collaboratively using fax communication between participants, poignantly satirize the cultures of Hollywood, of professional sports, and of the advertising industry through a critique of gender, race, sexuality, and status stereotyping. GALA Committee projects include, for example, a series of heirloom-like photographic portraits titled "Prostitute Ancestors" and an ironic sports trophy, "Father-Son Trophy," that seeks to unravel the cycles of aggression transmitted through mainstream sports culture. Several simulacra of David Hockney-like paintings will also be on view, including one depicting the site of the Rodney King beating and one depicting the home of Nicole Brown Simpson in Los Angeles.

Also included is Andrea Fraser’s performance and video piece, "Inaugural Speech," originally produced for the inSITE 97 San Diego/Tijuana art event. Unraveling the relationship between international arts events such as the inSITE 97 festival and other parallel counterparts such as the Venice Biennale, Sao Paolo Biennial, Documenta, and the Seoul Biennial, Fraser reveals the not-so-hidden relationships between business interest, art patronage, real-estate development, and these types of arts events as she examines the "pyramid of power for which artists and arts audiences form the base of support." The exhibition will also feature the video "Bringing IT to YOU! by the digital arts collective ®™Ark. Accompanied by their web-site and a large digital poster display, ®™Ark, challenges Late Capitalist, Multi-Nationalist corporate culture, through a strategy of corporate sabotage and digital infiltration.

The Visual Worlds exhibition has been developed for the Richard L. Nelson Gallery, UC Davis in conjunction with a major interdisciplinary conference organized by the Center for History, Society, and Culture (CHSC), UC Davis scheduled from October 26 – 28, 2001.

Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu