THEME DESCRIPTION SONDER: “The profound realization that everyone, including strangers passed on the street, has a life as complex as one’s own.” We often go about our lives with tunnel vision, forgetting that others lead just as complex and vivid lives as ourselves. To cultivate a growing movement of empathy, this exhibition aims to explore how art can encourage others to understand the beauty in the people around them. How do we, as artists and as people, look beyond what we see at face value to embrace the masterpieces within?
THEME DESCRIPTION Encouraging artists to explore the different forms and meanings of love through their artwork, we posed the question: In a culture that offers to sell us every desire, in the age of the Hallmark card, how do we talk about love? This purposefully simple exhibition title provoked a broad range of responses and interpretations. The artworks featured in this exhibition express personal stories, desires, and anxieties about love across a variety of mediums- and above all, they express a yearning for human connection that especially resonates in the context of a global pandemic. Whether created by a single artist or through collaboration as one half of a pair, each piece weaves its own thread into the show's tapestry, illustrating how we approach interpersonal relationships across time and space, how profoundly we experience love both new and old, and how we learn to love ourselves and each other.
THEME DESCRIPTION Our exhibition theme, Querencia, considers the relationship between physical spaces and identity, power, and safety. As the quarantine began, the concept of home became unstable and fraught for many college students suddenly caught between local campus residences and family homes, many facing housing insecurity and exploitative rent termination fees. Public spaces such as the college campus became inaccessible, transforming from safe and familiar spaces to areas of uncertainty and risk. Many of the artists in this show respond to the conditions of the pandemic, reflecting on returns to childhood hometowns or their new relationships with online spaces. Their works reflect shared anxieties and hopes during a period of uncertainty, loss, and separation. Threads of isolation, nostalgia, found families, and connection wind through the artists' artworks and stories, joining us across space and forming our own Querencia.
THEME DESCRIPTION The Art History Undergraduate Association, inspired by artists who use art to magnify aspects of inward and outward reality, set the theme Under the Scope, asking artists to explore ways of perception and deception. Some artworks respond to the theme directly while others have taken a metaphorical approach in their manifestation of the artists' message. Put in dialogue with one another, these works create a spectrum of interpretation that speaks to each viewer's unique reality. When we consider what is gained and lost in the act of looking, new ideas and perspectives are born .
THEME DESCRIPTION Transcending Limitations presents works by artists from the UCI community. By encouraging individual expression, the Art History Undergraduate Association hopes to explore the way that students, faculty, and alumni choose to convey, conceal, and identify aspects of limitations in their lives. In a world obsessed with the big picture, single voices and personal histories are too easily dismissed. All people struggle with limitations that are either personally imposed or imposed upon them by society. Art confronts these realities. We invite you to reveal how you push and break through limitations and experiment with the limitations that define who you are. Think about the way that we transmit or conceal our identities, forge new meanings, create new dialogues, or touch upon shared human experiences.
THEME DESCRIPTION Science and art. A ridiculous contest, considering how each influences and reflects each other. Far from the methodical and objective discipline, it is often thought that science depends on innovation to achieve the unimaginable or to make new discoveries. Art constantly changes its definitions to include new ideas and new technologies to reshape the way that people think about the world. The whole of our society thrives on creativity in visualizing possibility for the future. Altered Perceptions invites viewers to experience the interdependence and exchange between the arts and sciences and how they can lead to progress. Through this exhibition, we present diverse interpretations and encourage viewers to take part in discourse.
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