New Kids on the ARTsBlock

As a local critic endlessly on the lookout for good art in the Inland Empire, all I can say is—thank God for Sweeney. The most reliable venue for high-quality cutting-edge contemporary art in the IE, UCR's Sweeney Art Gallery, in conjunction with UCR's California Museum of Photography, has struck gold again with its latest exhibit, "Compass."

At turns brutal, breathtaking and hilarious, the dozens of works in this massive show offer a statewide survey of the newest crop of talent from the UC system's eight MFA programs. Curators Ciara Ennis and Tyler Stallings spotlight thirteen emerging artists, the crème-de-la-crème from Berkeley, LA, Davis, Irvine, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, San Diego and our very own Riverside. They're all young, all recently graduated—and they've all got game.

A childlike sense of play and very mature wit combine in Kara Hearn's hilarious and weirdly touching "Reincarnated Scenes" (2005), a series of video reenactments of scenes from movies that made her cry. The films she mimics are all big, flashy blockbusters with broad popular appeal—Gladiator, E.T., and Star Wars Episode III (only out of respect and affection for the artist's work do I refrain from razzing her for actually crying at the latter hoke-fest), but Hearn's reenactments are as low budget as they come. All roles are all played by the artist, a UC Berkeley MFA grad; the props are household items (a drumstick for Darth Vader's light saber, a t-shirt sleeve for Commodus' crown), and the set is her apartment. Exuberant, self-serious, and unabashedly amateur, each video vignette has the look and feel something an introverted ten-year-old might cook up in his bedroom, and each compellingly undercuts the big-budget bravado of the original films with something only a child—or a very talented adult—could bring: true wonder.

Like Hearn, UC San Diego's Robert Twomey also incorporates looped video into his work, but with a very different sensibility. "One Way to Form a Bond" (2006) is a mixed media installation that's bound to get Sweeney visitors talking. The focal point is a video of the artist fondling and French-kissing a rifle, a disturbing extrapolation of the bond between humanity and weaponry, between the body—specifically the male body—and elements of warfare and destruction.

UCR's John Sisley offers a somber meditation of a different sort in his subtle, controlled pieces. Sisley's work explores the paradoxical limitations of information in an age which promises to drown us in it. "Audiotape # 2 (18 ½ Minutes)" (2007) shows a tangle of audiotape—an obsolete medium—loosely unfurled across a blank white background. The title alludes to the amount of time that was erased from the Watergate tapes, a historical reference that reinforces Sisley's broader ideas. His work posits a kind of information purgatory created by our hyper-mediated culture, where destroyed records and outmoded media hold vast amounts of information that is as inaccessible as it is mysterious.

UC Santa Barbara's Nichole Van Beek explores a more region-specific topic in "The Island of Questionable Value" (2007). This mixed media installation examines the fate of Santa Rosa Island, off the coast of Santa Barbara, where competing parties—the National Park system, Native Americans, tourists, archeologists and hunters—vie for rights to the land, and eke out an uneasy coexistence. On Van Beek's island, natural and synthetic materials combine and coexist in ways that range from colorful and bizarre to unseemly and grotesque. On the ground sit mounds of faux boulders made of balled-up plastic bags bound in colorful strings; on the wall, a display of items that resemble primitive tools and weapons à la the Flintstones, fashioned paradoxically from lightweight plastics, toys and bits of foam. A cave-like structure in the center of the installation houses Van Beek's most disturbing juxtaposition—a cozy sleeping bag made of fabric depicting the guts of eviscerated animals.

It's a shame that, as new MFA graduates, these artists will have to face the steep uphill battle for exposure and compensation that is the fate of nearly every visual artist in this country. So with that in mind, do your part to support the arts in the IE—find your way to "Compass."

"Compass" runs through September 22 at Sweeney at the University of Riverside (3800 Main Street). Visit www.sweeney.ucr.edu for more info.