MCASD's downtown Jacobs Building (1100 Kettner Blvd.) is currently closed for installation. The Jacobs Building galleries will reopen on July 12 with the exhibitions Attempt to Raise Hell and Octagon: Photographs by Kevin Lynch.
Rinehart Herbst (Todd Rinehart and Catherine Herbst), Potential Architectures, 2009, aluminum, digital prints, Baltic birch model. Courtesy of Rinehart Herbst, San Diego. Photo by Pablo Mason.
MIX: Nine San Diego Architects and Designers
MCASD LA JOLLA
May 22 through September 6, 2009
Showcasing the work of innovative architects and designers in the San Diego community, MIX provides in-depth presentations by nine remarkable practicioners. estudio teddy cruz, Luce et Studio Architects (Jennifer Luce), Sebastián Mariscal Studio, Public (James Gates and James Brown), Rinehart Herbst (Todd Rinehart and Catherine Herbst), Lloyd Russell, and Jonathan Segal FAIA represent a generation of practitioners who graduated from architecture school during the 1980s. Selected for their unique, idiosyncratic practices, this distinctive group emphasizes a multidisciplinary approach and an expanded role in the economic factors underlying architecture.
MIX features seven project rooms, one for each firm, and encourages the studios to go beyond the common presentation of typical architecture exhibitions. As a result, the seven firms engage in self-analysis and scrutiny of their own histories that many have not attempted before. Models, plans, and photos demonstrate the evolution of design and development strategies; brilliant diagrammatic representations of social and economic conditions show how proposals emerge; and sculptural forms express the evolution of intricate modes of construction. A common thread throughout the variety of presentations is an inclination towards revealing processes that often lie hidden behind the material and stylistic façade of architecture. The demonstration of these processes is the axis on which this exhibition centers, and parallels the importance of practice to MIX architects, who seek to maintain direct engagement with as well as enrich the material and social fabric of their sites and contexts.
MIX: Nine San Diego Architects and Designers is made possible, in part, by The Getty Foundation, which supported the project’s interpretive materials and research. This is part of a series called Connecting to Place. Additional support comes from the County of San Diego Community Projects Fund and the Office of Supervisor Pam Slater-Price, the San Diego County Community Enhancement Program, and MCASD’s Annual Fund donors. Corporate support is provided by Arclinea San Diego and bulthaup San Diego. The Architect's Newspaper is the exhibition's official media sponsor.
Robert Irwin, Dia Beacon, West Gates, 2001, color pencil and ink on Mylar. Promised gift of L.J. Cella, PG.
Abstraction for Everyday Life
MCASD LA JOLLA
May 22 through September 6, 2009
Alice Aycock, Robert Irwin, Matt Mullican, and Robert Venturi are presented in Abstraction for Everyday Life, an exhibition of promised gifts and works on paper from the Museum's collection. This group of works all utilize forms of architectural drawing, rendering, and sketching to represent abstracted and evocative states and ideas, as well as the opposite-drawing plans made to create functional objects and physical structures whose origins lie in theory and subjective perception.
Architectural drawing is a widely accepted form of abstraction. Its many codes are universally understood and serve to translate a concept from its immaterial state, into a two-dimensional representation, and finally to a three-dimensional material condition inhabiting our everyday life.
Abstraction for Everyday Life is made possible, in part, by The Getty Foundation, which supported the project's interpretive materials and research on the collection. This is part of a series called Connecting to Place. Additional support comes from the Museum's Annual Fund donors.
Primary Forms: Illuminated and Opaque features Minimalist and Post-Minimalist works from the MCASD collection.
As squares and cubes are the basis of the modular sculpture by Sol LeWitt, so are circles and spheres the foundation for Keith Sonnier’s 1970s incandescent light reliefs that explore this medium’s reflection and diffusion. Primary forms also echo in Stephen Antonakos’ staked neon light sculpture, as well as in the hanging neon pieces of Las Vegas-based Pasha Rafat—an artist of a later generation whose work is indebted to both the rigor of LeWitt’s form and to Antonakos' use of neon to inform and articulate space.
Two recent acquisitions of theatrical light and glass pane wall reliefs by Sonnier, exhibited for the first time, are presented with another work, their equivalent in neon. A light box by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar utilizes the same shapes—the square and circle—but now as part of a documentary piece that remains a beautiful exploration of luminosity through colored film. A two-channel video by the Mexico City-based British artist Melanie Smith completes the exhibition’s lighthearted meditation on formal variation, revealing the sheer labor and exertion behind such pure manifestations of light and matter.
NANCY RUBINS, PLEASURE POINT, 2006, stainless steel and boats, museum purchase, international and contemporary collectors funds. PHOTOgraphy by PABLO MASON.
NANCY RUBINS: PLEASURE POINT
MCASD LA JOLLA
ONGOING
MCASD commissioned Los Angeles-based sculptor Nancy Rubins to create a permanent, large-scale work on the west side of the MCASD La Jolla facility, and the site-specific sculpture's installation was completed in January 2006. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Pleasure Point is an accumulation of rowboats, canoes, jet skis, and surfboards. Attached to the roof of the Museum and cantilevered above the heads of viewers, Rubins' gravity-defying sculpture is held together under tension through welds and wire.
ERIKA ROTHENBERG: MONUMENT TO A BEAR, 2003, GLASS REINFORCED CONCRETE OVER STEEL, BRONZE PLAQUE, COLLECTION MCASD. photography by pablo mason.
Edwards GARDEN GALLERY
MCASD LA JOLLA
ONGOING
Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the Edwards Garden Gallery features acquired and commissioned sculptural works by a wide variety of artists including Edward Ruscha, Iran Do Espírito Santo, Niki de Saint Phalle, Judith Shea, Erika Rothenberg, Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Roman de Salvo, Vito Acconci, Richard Fleischner, Nina Levy, Gabriel Orozco, and Mauro Staccioli.
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
T 858 454 3541 / F 858 454 6985 / info@mcasd.org
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