The Leonardo Art, Science, Evening Rendezvous (LASER) talks at UC Davis are evening presentations that engage the public as participants in conversations with artists, designers, scientists, and technologists making significant contributions to their fields. The evenings are designed to encourage unexpected juxtapositions between seemingly unrelated projects, facilitating the interdisciplinary conversations that engage the challenges of the 21st century.
WHEN: Thursday, January 31, 2019, 7:30-9:00 pm
WHERE: Art Annex, 107 Main
Dena Beard is the executive director of The Lab, a 34-year-old nonprofit experimental music and art space in San Francisco. At The Lab since 2014, Beard led the organization through a rehabilitation of its facility and inaugurated a new program of commissioned artistic projects.
Sangram Majumdar freely borrows from medieval Italian paintings, Indian miniatures, early video games, and other disparate sources in his paintings to examine the cyclical nature of history and the connections between cultural centers in Asia and the West.
Majumdar has had recent solo exhibitions at the Asia Society Texas Center and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York. He studied at Indiana University and the Rhode Island School of Design and is a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Rodrigo Valenzuela, Santiago, Chile 1982, lives and work in Los Angeles, CA. He studied art history and photography at University of Chile (2004), holds a BA in Philosophy at The Evergreen State College and an MFA at University of Washington.
Recent residencies include Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Texas), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Maine), MacDowell Colony (NH), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Nebraska), Lightwork (Syracuse) and the Center for Photography at Woodstock (New York).
Edgar Arceneaux mixes drawing, sculpture, video, film and performance to explore how we construct history and memory in a racially divided country. His work has been shown at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Performa 15, New York; the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, among other venues.
Frances Stark’s drawings, collages, videos, PowerPoint presentations, performances, and paintings have been extensively exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. In 2017 a new suite of her paintings were included in the Whitney Biennial, her cinematic opera, The Magic Flute, premiered at LACMA, and an earlier work was featured in the Venice Biennale. In 2015, Stark’s sprawling mid-career survey, UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991-2015, opened at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles before traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Sarah Cain moves beyond the traditional notion of painting within the frame by exploring abstraction and spatial interventions in a wide range of media and found materials. Leading a way into new territories of abstraction, Cain moves fluidly between works on site and her object-based studio practice. Cain was born in Albany, New York, in 1979. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
The UC Davis Department of Art and Art History’s Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture series brings artists, writers and curators to campus. All presentations are free and take place at 4:30 p.m. at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
The Art Building is located on Hutchison Drive, about halfway between the Memorial Union and Mrak Hall on the UC Davis campus. There is limited parking behind the building, but there is visitor parking nearby, across the Arboretum in lot VP5.
