The UAG presents the second year M.F.A. exhibition "After Many Sunsets"

Irvine, Calif., January 31, 2023 — The University Art Galleries (UAG) will present After Many Sunsets, an exhibition of nine second-year M.F.A. students presenting works for their advancement to candidacy in the Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine's Claire Trevor School of Arts. The exhibition will run from February 19–March 11, 2023, with a public opening reception on Sunday, February 19, from 2–5 p.m. and presented in the University Art Gallery and Room Gallery. The galleries are open Tuesday–Saturday, 2–6 p.m. PST.

The exhibition features work by Lauren Goldenberg, Alberto Lule, Khadijah Silva, Gintautė Skvernytė, Liz Stringer, Joshua Thomen, Mona Welch, Devin Wilson, and Christopher Yang.

Lauren Goldenberg makes works of handmade paper that oscillate between painting and sculpture in a way that embraces the structural potential of collage. Birthed from a process-driven practice, the work cannibalizes the off-spray and discarded material from other works, suggesting they were excavated directly from the studio floor.
 
Alberto Lule uses forensics and performance to explore the privatization of correctional institutions in relation to the body as archive. The ubiquitous nature of commodification, identification, and the use of tools by agents of authority, are used to “investigate the investigators.”

Joshua T Thomen Takahashi’s work crudely deartciulates and transfigures objects of celebration and ritual. Within the objects’ internal repetition, alternative understandings of temporality, liberty, and interrelationality can be supported.

Khadijah Silva is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines the relationality of displacement and stolen histories of Blackness. She contemplates the body and its image from aesthetic and epistemic vantage points, using opacity as a means to articulate the nuanced complexity of identity within the Black diaspora.

Gintautė Skvernytė
Paraffin casts are exposed on the floor and thrown vertically, carrying a score of reticulated marks. Adhered directly to the walls, punctuated slices transmit a notion of pattern.

Liz Stringer uses meditative drawing to navigate private and egotistical moments of self, looping into an existential narrative of horror. Repetitive and residual layers of meaning compound to articulate bodies in stages of failure. The works highlight a variety of physical properties using aggregate actions to enact these moments of the poetic.
    
Mona Welch
Though shrouded in fiction and the look of writing, seriality elicits veracity. The Columnists report. Four large paintings and five smaller works on paper dispatch.
    
Devin Wilson’s practice explores the intersection of queerness and technology, specifically examining hybridization in speculative fiction. Their work reimagines capital in a realm controlled by the In-Techs corporation where digital culture, conspiracy theories of lizard-people, and 3D-printed fairies converge with online cyber-punk aesthetics. By adapting production methods from high-tech corporations such as Apple, their work attempts to expose the homocapitalistic intentions of these corporations through queer industrial satire.

Christopher Yang
Many hands make light work / Too many cooks spoil the broth

Parking: Mesa Parking Structure, 4002 Mesa Road, Irvine, CA 92617.
UAG: 712 Arts Plaza, Irvine, CA 92617