Drawing in the Margins | CCA STUDENT EXHIBITION

curated by Kim Anno

Justin Olerud, Ben Seevers, Doron Fishman, Eiko Yamamoto, Faye Dennis, Miranda Bergman, Cynthia Butler, Eddie Gesso, Lauren Cohen, Samson Snowden, Marilee Bogaert, Kristina Alcini, JR Potter

May 1-6, 2007

Reception for the Artists: Wednesday, May 2, 2007 6-9PM

Miranda Bergman

Swarm Gallery presents Drawing in the Margins, an exhibition of works on paper by students from the California College of the Arts.

Contemporary drawing is an elastic practice that spills over the edges of painting, sculpture, installation and performance. These thirteen artists are undergraduate students from the California College of the Arts and they present the best of work that generates from the practice of drawing and moves out from there. The highly refined as well as instrinsically rebellious work challenges and embraces the history of drawing as we know it.

This marks Kim Annos second curatorial project regarding the state of contemporary drawing in the Bay Area. (The first one being Peripheries of Narrative at Patricia Sweetow last July 2006) What is indicated is the rise of the influence of drawing(and its redefinition) in galleries, museums, and art schools today.

Please inquire with gallery for detailed information on works

In PROJECT SPACE - Tao Urban: Reading Room
Through May 6, 2007

Tao Urban is a resident of Los Angeles and attended the Rhode Island School of Design. Urban is drawn to the idea of fabricated environments. It can be said that we are constantly redefining and thereby reconstructing the environments in which we are immersed. His work represents the area where the psychological environment and the physical environments come together to create a cultural product. Design, entertainment and art are all products of this convergence. In Swarm Gallery's Project Space, the artist installed a central seating unit amidst modular shelving systems. The shelves hold literature relevant and conceptually related to the installation. Viewers are encouraged to interact in this installation by sitting and reading the artists selected ideologies behind the atmosphere that surrounds them. Urban's recent works have been exhibited at Acuna-Hansen Gallery in LA.

Reading Room

Thoughts on the Reading Room
by Tao Urban

In traditional terms, meaningful experience is created with a work of art by establishing a relationship between viewer and art-object. What interests me is when this relationship becomes a personal, intimate and domestic relationship.

Boris Arvatov discusses this relationship in his 1925 essay "Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing" (Byt I kul'tura veshchi), describing the modern object as an active (versus passive) "co-worker" to the human condition, redefining everyday life, consumption, and modernity. Thus contrasting the new Constructivist idea of the "socialist object" to the old idea of the capitalist commodity.

The intention of creating a "reading room" is to create an environment that encourages interaction in a casual and relaxed manner by creating a quiet space to read, think and construct/deconstruct, thus allowing room for the "co-worker" relationship to become more personal.

I want to simplify this relationship by removing myself from the position of direct authorship by presenting a system for building objects, leaving the functional specificity of the final construction up to the viewer.

The objects themselves are deemphasized because the acts of construction and interaction are the focal points of the artwork.

Project Space Installation: "Reading Room"