UMBC's Center for Art and Visual Culture presents the Visual Arts Faculty Biennial from November 15 through December 21. In this Sixth Biennial, members of UMBC's Department of Visual Arts exhibit their current research in interactive media, photography, installations, graphic design, new genre, painting, video and film. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, November 14, from 5 to 7 pm.

Exhibitors include Diyan Achjadi, Guenet Abraham, Dan Bailey, Melanie Berry, Lee Boot, Steve Bradley, Lynn Cazabon, Irene Chan, Mark Alice Durant, Symmes Gardner, Vin Grabill, Hollie Lavenstein, Lisa Moren, Tim Nohe, Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo, Chris Peregoy, Alan Price, Peggy Re, Ann Rosenthal, Teri Rueb, Amie Siegel, Jaromir Stephany, Mark Street, John Sturgeon, Calla Thompson, William-John Tudor, Renée van der Stelt, and David Yager. The work of four artists (Mark Street, Lynn Cazabon, Diyan Achjadi and Teri Rueb) is profiled in this release.

Two panel discussions will complement the exhibition. On Thursday, November 14th from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m., panelists Lynn Cazabon, Guenet Abraham, Diyan Achjadi, Mark Street, Vin Grabill and Timothy Nohe will discuss Practice and Content: Technology and the Arts. On Monday, December 9th from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m., Linda Dusman, Carol Hess, Alan Kriezenbeck, Anna Rubin and John Sturgeon will discuss Artmaking in Stressful Times: Influences of 9/11.

Mark Street's work ranges from abstract hand-manipulated material to work that recontextualizes found footage, to films that involve written texts. Each film attempts to investigate new terrain, and he avoids being confined by a specific look or mood. Among his works in the Biennial is Guiding Fictions (35mm, 5 minutes, color/sound, 2002), which premiered at the New York Film Festival in October, 2002. He states, "Images shot on walks in the forest with an old, twisted 35mm camera. The film trudged through the camera, on a last mission. I buried the film in the front yard. Let the dirt on the film kiss the dirt in the ground. Maryland humidity wore it down to its wisps. Much later, sound recorded in Brooklyn. Teenage skateboarders smoking cigarettes and jumping off the steps at my local subway entrance. A Russian festival in the park, much singing and speechmaking, all incomprehensible to me. The schism between the country and city, so clear at last."

Lynn Cazabon will exhibit excerpts from STORY OF M, consisting of 140 direct digital photographs. She states, "STORY OF M presents the photographic documentation of artifacts from a lifetime of a single person, outlining a skeletal story of their owner for the viewer to 'write'. The piece began two years ago when I acquired a large collection of films, videos (primarily pornographic in nature), and miscellaneous objects spanning a time period of approximately thirty years of their owner's life (referred to as M in the piece). While sorting through this collection, I came to realize that I was getting to know (looking at) this person I had never met through the material objects he kept and used over a period of time. My own fascination with this discovery was mirrored on the other side of these objects: by the knowledge of M's once insistent gaze upon them. The pornographic content of the collection underlined the voyeuristic nature of M's gaze, primarily upon images of women's bodies, and at the same time made me realize the voyeuristic nature of my own enterprise. M was a producer of images as well--the piece includes three short self-portrait films. These films position the viewer in place of the camera, implicating them in this circuit of gazes. The documentation of these objects also gives a short history of technological obsolescence, spanning a period of time from the mid-sixties to the mid-nineties. This time period contains the artifacts of the pre-digital age: super-8 and 8mm film, VHS video, eight-track and cassette tapes, and VHS-C video technologies. The images document a history of an individual as inscribed in what he consumed as well as in the changing technological standards for representation made available to him by the companies that create them."

Teri Rueb will exhibit The Choreography of Everyday Movement, which envisions as a topographical mapping the culturally inscribed nature of our everyday travels. Rueb says, "Using global positioning satellite receivers (GPS), the project seeks to render visible our movement through the built environment of the city, revealing socio-political and poetic patterns of traffic flow through the urban body. In these drawings we see images as often as we detect the variations of a traveler's movement through the city over time. The GPS, designed for precise measurement and navigation, is subverted and re-cast as a kind of giant pencil or tool for making chance compositions. The Choreography of Everyday Movement reduces the representation of movement and physical presence to the most basic visual abstraction in an attempt to privilege the poetic over the indexical.

"The project takes process and performance as the subject of the work. Artist, studio assistant and traveler are all equal performers in this process-based work which explores the performance of our everyday lives. Process and performance are articulated as live and archived elements in the exhibition. As a live element, a participant is tracked by GPS as she moves about the city. The trail of the participant's movement is transposed into visual terms as a dynamic drawing generated in real-time over the Internet and presented as a projection in the installation space.

"As an archived element, the drawings are recorded and presented for viewing in a three-dimensional format. Recorded journeys are prepared as vector-based drawings in Adobe Illustrator which are then printed on transparency film. Each printed journey is registered against prior journeys, and sandwiched between stacked 1/2" plates of glass. The stacks of glass grow taller over time with the addition of subsequent drawings, thus creating an expanding 'z-axis' through which the viewer can observe changes in the traveler's movement over time. Artist and studio assistant maintain the installation throughout the period of the exhibition by monitoring and recording each live Internet performance, translating drawings from performances into acetate prints, and integrating the prints into the glass stacks.

"The piece uses GPS receivers interfaced with laptop computers. Geographical data from the GPS units is passed wirelessly via cellular modem to a Java applet running on a server on the Internet. The Java applet translates geographical data into a drawing that is generated in real-time as the performers move about the city. Java applet and wireless integration were realized by In Choi, UMBC, 2002."

Diyan Achjadi will exhibit a digital fabric print, See Girl Run. She states, "Watching the news unfold in today's 24-hour television, the safety of home is punctured by images of violence occurring elsewhere, domestic comforts disjointed by the spectacle of other's pain. Recently my work has focused on the representation and use of militaristic attributes in the media, popular culture, and toys. Images from the news are taken, redrawn, and sometimes embroidered, in an attempt to negotiate the instantaneous delivery of information against the distance of place, the screen that simultaneously separates us from events while transporting to the epicenter. The labor of re-inscribing reconfigures the distant image, inserting the physical presence of a body."

The Center for Art and Visual Culture
The Center for Art and Visual Culture (formerly known as the Fine Arts Gallery) is a non-profit gallery space dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary art. The CAVC serves as a unique center for students, faculty, and the general public in the visualization and discussion of important philosophical and aesthetic issues of the day. Disciplines represented include painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, imaging and digital arts, video, film, installation and performance.

Since 1989, the CAVC has incorporated a number of public programs into its exhibition programming schedule to further impact the communities it serves. Symposia, lecture series, conferences, film series, visiting artist series, and residencies have all been fundamental in an effort to create an ongoing dialogue about contemporary art and culture. The Center has also initiated a number of projects with Baltimore and surrounding schools systems to integrate the contemporary artist and their concerns into the classroom. These projects take place on-site at both middle schools and high schools and are team taught by the instructors at these schools, professional artists, and students from the CAVC's Internship Program.

Currently the Center produces one to two exhibition catalogues each year. Each document is fully illustrated and contains critical essays on the given subject by a variety of distinguished professionals in the field. With the printing of Minimal Politics: Performativity and Minimalism in Recent American Art in 1997, the CAVC inaugurated a new series of publications entitled Issues in Cultural Theory. These catalogues are published yearly and are distributed internationally through Distributed Publishers in New York.

Since 1992, the Center for Art and Visual Culture has actively pursued the organization of exhibitions that contain the aesthetic, theoretical, and educational potential to reach both a national and international audience. Over the years, the CAVC has traveled these exhibition projects to a broad spectrum of museums, professional non-profit galleries, and universities national and internationally. These traveling exhibitions include:

• Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations (2001)
• Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (1999)
• Bruno Monguzzi: A Designer's Perspective (1998)
• Minimal Politics (1997)
• Kate Millet, Sculpture: The First 38 Years (1997)
• Layers: Contemporary Collage from St. Petersburg, Russia (1995/96)
• Notes In Time: Leon Golub and Nancy Spero (1995)
• Ciphers of Identity (1994)
• Nancy Graves: Recent Works (1993)
• Environmental Terror (1992)

Beyond the scope of these traveling exhibitions, the Center for Art and Visual Culture also undertakes an exhibition schedule that includes a Faculty Biennial, and projects such as the Joseph Beuys Tree Partnership. As part of the educational mission of the CAVC, one graduate thesis exhibition and one undergraduate senior exhibition are scheduled on a yearly basis.

This multi-faceted focus for presenting exhibitions, projects and scholarly research publications focused on contemporary art and cultural issues positions the Center for Art and Visual Culture in a unique position within the mid-Atlantic region.

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Wednesday: 10 A.M. - 5:00 P.M.
Thursday: 10 A.M. - 5:00 P.M.
Friday: 10 A.M. - 5:00 P.M.
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CAVC offices: (410) 455-3188
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This release as a pdf document (2.1Mb): http://www.umbc.edu/newsevents/arts/releases/02fall/biennial.pdf

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From Baltimore and points north, proceed south on I-95 to exit 47B. Take Route 166 toward Catonsville and then follow signs to the Fine Arts Building.

From I-695, take Exit 12C (Wilkens Avenue) and continue one-half mile to the entrance of UMBC at the roundabout intersection of Wilkens Avenue and Hilltop Road. Turn left and follow signs to the Fine Arts Building.

From Washington and points south, proceed north on I-95 to Exit 47B. Take Route 166 toward Catonsville and then follow signs to the Fine Arts Building.

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