Exhibitions and Permanent Collection

Maya Lin, 2x4 Landscape, 2006, wood, Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Colleen Chartier.

Maya Lin has continuously addressed notions of landscape and geologic phenomena in her work. She has an extraordinary ability to convey complex and poetic ideas using simple forms and natural materials. Lin thinks and works in a scale that relates to the land. Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes is a meditation on our relationship to landscape, whether direct or reinterpreted via computer or satellite imagery.

Systematic Landscapes focuses on a trio of large-scale sculptural installations that offer a different means for viewers to encounter and comprehend the landscape. Wedding a deep interest in forces and forms of nature with a long-term investigation into the possibilities of sculptural form to embody meaning, the exhibition offers a rich, immersive experience for visitors.

Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes is organized for the Henry Art Gallery by Director Richard Andrews. Major support for this exhibition has been provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Peter Norton Family Foundation.

The San Diego presentation of the exhibition is made possible by a generous gift from Laurie Mitchell and Brent Woods. Additional support is provided by The James Irvine Foundation, the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Program, generous contributors to MCASD's Annual Fund, and MCASD Members.

View a SignOnSanDiego.com audio/video slideshow, featuring an interview with MCASD Senior Curator Stephanie Hanor.

Nina Katchadourian, Accent Elimination(installation view), 2005, video installation. Courtesy of the artist.

For more than 15 years, New York artist Nina Katchadourian has investigated codes of expression, language, and translation, creating a body of work that emphasizes equally successful communicative exchanges as miscommunication, misreadings, and illegibility. Born in California to her Finnish-Swedish mother and Armenian-Turkish father, Katchadourian’s work often links language and signage to heritage and lineage.

Cerca Series: Nina Katchadourian will present the six-channel video piece Accent Elimination (2005), a work that explores cultural assimilation and speech as heirloom. Inspired by posters advertising "accent elimination" courses, the artist worked with her parents and a professional speech improvement coach for several weeks in order to "neutralize" her parents' accents and then learn each of their distinct accents herself. The multi-channel piece documents the process of unlearning and relearning the three of them underwent, revealing their struggle to hear and imitate something so familiar yet so difficult to reproduce.

The other work in the exhibition, entitled Zoo (2007), consists of footage shot in eight different zoos over the past six years. It is presented at MCASD Downtown as a 19-channel projection and monitor installation that will occupy the entire Royston Gallery at 1001 Kettner. Footage of various animals and zoo settings throughout the world is edited to recreate an artificial animal environment marked by visual as well as acoustic recordings that play concurrently to create a sense of disorientation and disjunction.

Cerca Series: Nina Katchadourian is made possible by a grant from the LLWW Foundation and gifts to MCASD's Annual Fund. Programs at MCASD Downtown are made possible, in part, by grants from The James Irvine Foundation, the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, and the County of San Diego.

Joshua Mosley, dread, 2007, Mixed Media Animation, Courtesy of the artist.

Cerca Series: Joshua Mosley presents dread (2007), a mixed-media installation consisting of a short animated film and five bronze sculptures. Recently on view at the 52nd Venice Biennale to critical acclaim, Joshua Mosley's dread combines computer animation, stop-motion animation, digital sound, sculpture, as well as the artist's own music and dialogue, creating a philosophical exploration of the human necessity to confront and apprehend nature.

In the film, an animated photographic forest is the background against which two characters—modeled on French philosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal—hold a conversation on the relationship between God-given natural order, free will, and the human and animal conditions.

Cerca Series: Joshua Mosley is made possible by gifts to MCASD's Annual Fund.

Skeet McAuley, Maderas Golf Club, 1st Green, Poway, CA, 2000, Fujichrome print, edition 1 of 5, Museum purchase, Elizabeth W. Russell Foundation Fund.

Skeet McAuley: The Garden of Golf was originally shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2001. Selections from the exhibition showcase six large-scale photographs, now in the Museum’s collection, of golf course landscapes in the San Diego region. Between the summer of 2000 and the spring of 2001, Los Angeles-based artist Skeet McAuley traveled throughout San Diego County visiting and photographing more than a dozen golf courses, from the most dramatic mountain and desert fairways to rocky greens by the sea.

Throughout his career, McAuley has used photography as a means to study the relationship between today’s consumer-driven culture and the natural environment. By photographing the courses in the early morning and at sunset, McAuley took advantage of the dramatic lighting and atmosphere to study these unique landscapes that are at once natural and man-made. The enormous, color-saturated images document how the courses are designed, watered, and cared for to satisfy the needs of the game of golf and create an idealized concept of nature.

NANCY RUBINS, PLEASURE POINT, 2006, stainless steel and boats, museum purchase, international and contemporary collectors funds. PHOTOgraphy by PABLO MASON.

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.

Bear
ERIKA ROTHENBERG: MONUMENT TO A BEAR, 2003, GLASS REINFORCED CONCRETE OVER STEEL, BRONZE PLAQUE, COLLECTION MCASD. photography by pablo mason.

The Garden Gallery features newly acquired and commissioned pieces by artists Erika Rothenberg and Marcos Ramirez ERRE. MCASD also commissioned Allison Wiese to create a site-specific sound installation, Vamp. A graduate of UCSD and the prestigious Core Fellowship program at the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, Wiese creates works across a broad range of media. Her work is generally site-specific, often transforming everyday items into performative experiences. In the spirit of John Cage, Wiese has developed a solar-powered theremin that can be played by Museum visitors, the ocean breeze, or passing seagulls. With Vamp, she has created a deliberately low-tech and low-maintenance sound installation that related to the specificity of the Museum’s location on the Pacific Ocean and the beautiful artificiality of the garden landscape.

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