FIRST FRIDAY

NOV 2, 2012, 8:00 - 10:00 PM   

Please join us for our First Friday event, a monthly celebration of the contemporary art world with amazing exhibitions, music, food, and cash bar.  

November's First Friday features the opening of Megan Geckler's No chance to move backwards and see, and music by DJ Jesse Walker. More

ELECTION NIGHT  

NOV 6, 2012, 7:00 PM-TBD    

Join us for the climactic moment of Jonathan Horowitz's examination of our divided political culture by watching the election returns inside of the Your Land/My Land: Election '12 exhibition.  Will Barack Obama's portrait remain on the wall of the gallery as our President and Commander-in-Chief, or will it be replaced with the portrait of Mitt Romney on election night?   

Megan Geckler creates site-specific installations using
brightly colored construction flagging tape, mathematical calculations, and color theory. Geckler's installation at UMOCA, No chance to move backwards and see, transforms the gallery space, inviting the viewer to take an exploratory journey through chromatic examples of architecture, design, sculpture, and painting.

Drawing from geometric illusionism and principles of design, No chance to move backwards and see presents woven wall murals, a custom sculptural extension of architectural elements, several modular sculptural works, and nine tape 'paintings' that offer a Joseph Albers-esque color study of the colors of the installation.

Geckler's installation incorporates the gallery walls and spaces to create optically dazzling, geometric forms and patterns in blue, orange, green, and yellow. Carefully designed to continue and echo the dynamic forms of her successive flagging tape configurations, the sightlines from each entrance to the gallery yield a different experience of the layered colors and patterns therein.

More  

Battleground States brings together artists who critically engage with the discourse of visual culture and gender studies. Through video, sculpture, installation, and photography, these works explore ideas of how figuration and identity are connected.

The exhibition begins with Utah artist Trevor Southey as his process of self-realization has made him an art historical pivot when discussing gender politics within the culture of Utah. The narrative continues by presenting generations of artists across the globe, leading the viewer along a path of self-realization in which concepts of coupling or completing the self are represented as spiritual quests.

Battleground States analyzes the space between traditional gender duality by exploring alternative forms such as the third gender, a generally foreign concept in Western culture. In their non-Western roles, these alternative identities denote a space for possibility and transcendence. The exhibition moves towards notions of the "post-gender" as a way to better understand how our cultural diversities open up interpretations of a third space.

Battleground States is made possible in part through the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the B. W. Bastian Foundation and IASPIS: The Swedish Arts Grants Committee's International Programme for Visual Artists.  

More  

Knock on wood. Grab the lucky penny. Don't cross the black cat's path. Beware the number 13. Drive a rusty nail through a lime to avoid the evil eye.  

Superstition is one of the most uniting forces across cultures. Whether conscious or unconscious, with zeal, skepticism or denial, our behaviors, daily rhythms, architecture and design are determined by superstitions both arcane and contemporary.

Artist Jason Metcalf has painstakingly researched, re-enacted and refreshed languages of superstition long forgotten from day-to-day vernacular with provenance in places as far as Haiti and as near as the Sanpete Valley. Entities, obsessions, legends and lore from various cultures provide the sculptural and performative language displayed in his solo exhibition. More 

The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art joins the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the New Museum in New York, and other museums across the U.S. to present Jonathan Horowitz's Your Land/My Land: Election '12-a special exhibition coinciding with the 2012 American Presidential election.

Your Land/My Land: Election '12 is a reimagined installation originally presented by Horowitz during the 2008 presidential election. At each location (as in '08), red and blue area rugs  divide the exhibition space into opposing zones, reflecting America's color-coded, political, and cultural divide. Back-to-back monitors are suspended between the carpets, with one broadcasting a live feed of Fox News, the other of MSNBC. 

The space created by Horowitz provides a location for people to gather and watch coverage of as well as talk about the presidential election. The installation's central trope is a divided United States swathed in only red and blue.

Nov 6, 7 PM-TBD: Join us in the Your Land/My Land exhibition for Election Night. 

More 

Over the last few years, UMOCA has undertaken several initiatives to better serve the Utah arts community, including: the opening of our new Locals Only Gallery, the organization of our first exhibition of Utah artists for an out-of-state venue (last year's West of Center show in Los Angeles), and better integration of Utah and national artists in our group exhibitions.

Now, UMOCA is ready to take our support of Utah artists to the next level with our new Artist-in-Residence Program, the only long-term artist residency designed specifically to meet the needs of artists living in Utah. Utah artists will be selected primarily based on demonstrated artistic potential, commitment to working in a contemporary idiom, willingness to participate in a robust and intellectually-engaged community of artists, and readiness to devote the time necessary to advance their professional careers to the next level.      

UMOCA residents will receive a wide variety of benefits, including up to two years of free studio space inside the museum itself. UMOCA will also provide residents with private meetings with national curators, critics, and other art world professionals who will be brought to UMOCA specifically to give our residents opportunities for higher visibility inside and outside the state. In addition, UMOCA will support residents by offering workshops in professional development, monthly critiques, special access to visiting artists and lecturers, exhibition opportunities outside the museum, a week-long working vacation in rural Utah, and greater chances for community engagement.   

Our goal with the new residency program is to make it possible for Utah artists to pursue successful careers at the national level while maintaining their homes here in this state.

The UMOCA Artist-in-Residence application deadline is Nov. 15, 2012, so be sure to visit our website soon for residency information and application requirements.

UMOCA's Artist-in-Residence program is supported in part through a generous grant from the R. Harold Burton Foundation. 

Getting tired of using the same old materials to make your art? Need some inspiration? Wish you could help a professional artist create giant colorful weavings out of flagging tape? Well look no more, UMOCA has yet another awesome opportunity for you!