Public_Culture

Jordan Crandall is Chair of the Visual Arts department. He is an artist, theorist, and performer based in Los Angeles.  His video installations, presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide, combine formats and genres deriving from cinematic and military culture, exploring new regimes of power and their effects on subjectivity, sociality, embodiment, and desire.  His most recent video installation, HOTEL (2010), produced in advanced, 4K high definition technology, probes into the realms of extreme intimacy, where techniques of control combine with techniques of the self.  Crandall writes and lectures regularly at various institutions across the US and Europe.  He is the 2011 winner of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award for outstanding theory and research-based digital arts practice, given by the Transmediale in Berlin in collaboration with the Vilém Flusser Archive of the University of Arts, Berlin.  He is currently an Honorary Resident at Eyebeam art and technology center in New York, where he is continuing the development of a new body of work that blends performance art, political theater, philosophical speculation, and intimate reverie.  The work, entitled UNMANNED, explores new ontologies of distributed systems  -- a performative event-philosophy in the form of a book and a theatrical production.  He is also the founding editor of the new journal VERSION.     He has recently given keynote lectures at several major conferences including "Cosmobilities" at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich; "Architectures of Fear" at the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture; and "Sorting Daemons" at Queens University, Ontario.  Other lectures include “Goodbye Privacy” at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; the ESRC/Surveillance Studies Network Seminar Series at the Department of Geography, University of Durham, UK; the conference "Everyday Militarism: New Zones of Empire" at UC Berkeley; the Cultural Studies Colloquium Series at UC Davis; and the conference "Architecture in Mind -- Trans-Thinking the City" at the Delft School of Design, Netherlands.  He has have been awarded several research fellowships:  most recently, a fellowship and residency at Newcastle University, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape (Global Urban Research Unit/Culture Lab), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship at the NEH/Vectors Summer Institute on Multimodal Scholarship the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, USC.  He is a researcher in residence at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2).   An anthology of Crandall's projects and critical writing, Drive: Technology, Mobility, and Desire, is available from Hatje Cantz Verlag.  His writing has appeared in such books as Architectures of Fear (Barcelona Center of Contemporary Culture); Synthetic Times: Media Art China (The MIT Press);  Worterbuch des Krieges/Dictionary of War (Merve Verlag Berlin); and The Aesthetics of Risk (JRP Ringier) -- as well as in journals including Estudio Visuales; CTheory; Atlantica; Art Journal; Journal of Visual Culture, and Theory, Culture, and Society.  His ongoing art and research project Under Fire, concerning the organization and representation of war, has resulted in two catalogues published by the Witte de With center for contemporary art, Rotterdam, and an online archive developed for the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville.  Crandall’s other books include Trigger Projekt (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2002); Heatseeking (Caen: Esac, 2002); Suspension (Kassel: Documenta X, 1997); and Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network (New York: D.A.P., 2001).     Crandall's earlier works include the site-specific video installation Suspension (1997) commissioned by Documenta X in Kassel; a seven-part video installation entitled Drive (1998-99), commissioned by the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlshrue; a six-part video installation entitled Heatseeking (2000), commissioned by inSITE in San Diego and Tijuana; and Trigger (2002), a two-channel video installation which debuted in October 2002 at Henry Urbach Architecture, New York, supported by the New York State Department of Cultural Affairs and ARTSPACE, San Francisco and New York.     Solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki; the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz; ARTLAB in Tokyo; the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil in Mexico City; the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie in Caen; the Kunst-Werke in Berlin; the Kitchen in New York; AGORA in Rio de Janeiro; the Edith Russ Site für Medienkunst in Oldenburg; and the TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst in Rotterdam.  His work has also been presented in group exhibitions at major institutions such as the Whitney Museum in New York, the Tate Modern, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.    Crandall's videos have been presented at many international film and media festivals including the World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam; the Transmediale International Media Art Festival Berlin; the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media; the Video Archeology Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria; the MIX Festival in New York City; the Berlin Biennial; the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruck, Germany; “Cine y Casi Cine” at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid; the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest; and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.   

Michael Trigilio is a multimedia artist living in San Diego. Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, he received his B.A. in Humanities from the University of Texas at San Antonio. His fear of religion notwithstanding, he was ordained as a lay Buddhist priest in 1997, a role from which he resigned five years later. He received his M.F.A. from Mills College in 2003. Michael's work is inspired by material that balances sarcasm and prayer, giving rise to works that examine religion, humor, narcissism, and demystification. His film, "Bodhisattva, Superstar" (2010), was included in the HERE NOT THERE exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. In December 2010, Michael joined Katie Faulkner, artistic director of San Francisco's Little Seismic Dance in a residency at the Maggie Allesse National Center for Choreography. Together they created the ambitious, large-scale dance-media work "We Don't Belong Here" as a commission for Dancers' Group in San Francisco's Union Square in Fall 2011. Michael is a founding member of the independent radio project Neighborhood Public Radio which was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial exhibition. This work in public-practice/public- culture/public-sonification was recently hosted in a three-month residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles in the Spring of 2011. Michael's work in video, sound, and radio has been presented in many venues nationally and internationally, notably the Anthology Film Archives in New York, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg, the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, and a commission for a soundwork at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Michael teaches courses in Media Arts and Sound at UC San Diego.

Jennifer Pastor is a sculptor who is joining the Visual Arts Department effective Fall 2001. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1988 and her MFA from UCLA in 1992. Pastor's sculptures are large in scope, materially complex, high involved hybrids. She has been investigating parallel and elastic structures in disparate subjects. Before coming to UCSD, Pastor taught at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA; Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida; and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Pastor has been exhibiting in national and international venues since 1994. She has had one-person exhibitions in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Milan, Italy as well as numerous group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. One-Person Exhibitions: Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (1994); Studio Guenzani, Milan, Italy (1995); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1996); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1996 and forthcoming 2002). Group Exhibitions: Surface De Reparation, FRAC Bourgone, Dijon, France (1994); Universalis, 23rd Biennial, Sao Paulo, Brazil (1996); Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (1997); Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960-1970, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humelback, Demark (1997); Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (1997); Present Tense, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (1997); Greengrassi, London, United Kingdom (1999); and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY (2000). Articles and reviews of Pastor's works have been in various publications such as Los Angeles Weekly (The Garden of Uncanny Delight, Ralph Rugoff, 1994), Blocknotes (review, Terry Myers, Fall 1994), ArtForum (review, Amy Gerstler, 1994), Documents (John Armleder, 1994), Frieze (Seasonal Change, Benjamin Weissman, 1996), Art & Text (Jennifer Pastor: Dream Day Residue, Susan Kandel, 1996), ArtForum (Openings, Jennifer Pastor, David Greene, 1996),The Village Voice (Museumification: The Whitney Biennial as Pleasure Machine, Peter Schjeldahl, 1997), and Harper's Bazaar (L.A.'s Female Art Explosion, Ralph Rugoff, 1997).

Anya Gallaccio emerged in the late '80s as part of the group of young British artists from Goldsmiths College in London. Since her first appearance in the historic 1988 Freeze exhibition, she has become established internationally, having exhibited at the Sculpture Centre, New York and Palazzo Delle Papesse, Sienna, and completed major commissions, including 'Motherlode' where she collaborated with vintner Zelma Long to make six zinfandel wines in Sonoma Valley. She has exhibited widely in the UK including Camden Art Centre, ICA, and Serpentine in London; the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and Bluecoat, Liverpool. Gallaccio was nominated for the Turner Prize and received the prestigious Sculpture Commission for the Duveen Gallery at Tate Britain in 2003. In 2009 she prepared a major new work for 'Radical Nature' at the Barbican, London. Gallaccio’s works are held in a variety of public collections including Tate; the Arts Council; The British Council Collection; South London Gallery; Victoria and Albert Museum; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Gallaccio is known for her early projects employing natural materials, including a room painted with chocolate (1994), an enormous ice block which melted over the duration of the exhibition in the Wapping Pumping Station (1996) to her intricate lawn design at Compton Verney, (2000). Gallaccio’s work paradoxically shifts between minimal approaches to form and a highly intuitive process. Often using the strategies of minimalism, the grid and modular units, and overturning them through the perishable organic materials she sources, such as fruit, trees, flowers, ice and sugar. The elemental quality of these materials results in natural processes of transformation and decay, often with unpredictable results which are dialogue with land artists 60's including Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria and their interest in entropy.

Teddy Cruz’ work dwells at the border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico, where he has been developing a practice and pedagogy that emerge out of the particularities of this bicultural territory and the integration of theoretical research and design production. Teddy’ Cruz has been recognized internationally in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar for its work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. He obtained a Masters in Design Studies from Harvard University and the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. He has recently received the 2004-05 James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize and is currently a Professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD in San Diego.