It is rather fitting to title a graduation exhibition “Hello World.”
Tonight’s group exhibition at the New Wight Gallery will feature the culmination of works by six master of fine arts candidates as they conclude their Design | Media Arts studies at UCLA.
“The exhibit came about as a way of our MFA program, and in a class we decided to focus our efforts as a show that would display our collective interest in design and art,” said Gautam Rangan, one of the Design | Media Arts graduate students showing at the exhibition.
Rangan will present the installation “Durga Vuelta,” featuring the story of Hindu goddess Durga and her battle with a bull-demon through spinning wooden disks and projected images of the myth.
Storytelling is also a motif that fellow master of fine arts candidate Christo Allegra uses in his work “Recollection,” in which he presents the messages that followed the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center buildings. Allegra, who previously worked at the World Financial Center next to the Twin Towers, used the World Trade Center buildings as his photo study in 2000 and has since done several pieces on the events of Sept. 11.
“The information is lined up in a way of how storytelling functions,” Allegra said. “I was going to interview people I knew in New York and then WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website, released all of the pager messages in the 24-hour period after the attacks, so I didn’t need to interview people because this is a first-person account of people’s experience on that day, so I decided to use that information for this installation.”
The show will also feature animation and automation ““ which is the usage of automatic equipment for manufacturing ““ in the work of another Design | Media Arts graduate student, Eric Siu. His installation “Shipment and Happiness” chronicles the journey of a cardboard box that has traveled 22,800 kilometers.
“I am merging concepts of animation and automation,” Siu said. “I want to bring animation into real life though the technology of automation. Basically, there’s a shipping box that is animated in real space, and it’s folding in the air, but it’s driven by motors and bells.”
There will also be a playful aspect through the exhibit. “The Lolitas,” by graduate student Madeleine Gallagher, features photographs of American women dressed in Japanese fashion styles. Gallagher photographed these women who gathered in California to share their respective passions for the girlish style of dress.
“There’s an element of (voyeurism), and there’s going to be people that are going to identify with Hello Kitty, like, “˜Oh, that’s Hello Kitty, that’s what I had when I was kid,'” Gallagher said. “Some people are going to find it strange that there are very close-up pictures of adult women that are dressed like children.”
Design | Media Arts graduate student Yoon Jung Han will present “Pieces of You,” an installation that uses mirrors to interact with the viewers. Fellow graduate student Melissanthi Saliba looks into how individuals interacted and moved within space in her installation “Moments of Liminal Space.”
For the candidates showing in the exhibit, this is a showcase of their respective aesthetics, which Siu said each student has arduously worked on individually for the past year.
“Every one of us spent a lot of time working on our project, and we really hope to see how people respond with the piece,” he said.
While there is a brief sense of irony in naming a concluding graduation show “Hello World,” Rangan said he sees it as a debut to the Design | Media Arts audience.
“I think ultimately the relationship all of us have to the concept of “˜Hello World’ is that we are looking for a way to kind of present our project,” Rangan said. “We’re kind of formulating our projects with an idea of what the new demands are and what the new audiences want.”