Mandeville Gallery Starts Sending Art from the Future

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Written by: Janice Kim

“I don’t know if I can milk 250 words out of this for my discussion post,” said student Scheele Breen.
Photo by Jordan Whitlow

UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery distinguishes itself from the Stuart Collection due to its ability to rotate between multiple installations a year. On the wraparound LED screen that faces the streetside, past projections have included an eco-poem that included the line, “How big is Here?” and posited that artists “practice / Seeing”; a model who typed out messages with their tongue; and currently, the MFA in Visual Arts Preview, showcasing increasingly zoomed-in footage of dust on skin. These highlights seek to ask viewers to ask themselves: just what are they looking at? 

“So when The New Piece showed up overnight, of course we all jumped at beholding it.” Gallery greeter Wendolyn Whithers reflected on the now-empty white walls of the interior. Sometime between the gallery’s closing hours of Sunday through Tuesday, all the existing pieces had been carefully moved to the darkroom and replaced by a large object. Whithers had arrived to open the building the following Wednesday and reported being temporarily blinded when it and the LED screen suddenly flashed at a luminous intensity of 60,000 candela. “I think there’s meaning in that though, that I had to get hurt in order to feel the piece. I mean, just look at it,” Whithers stopped checking their reflection to do so. “Everyone should want their breath taken by it, I’d think.” 

The New Piece is the acting name assigned to the structure while scholars work to decipher the writing on the walls. “Indeed, the text plaques are placed in such a way that the human eye must look at either it or the piece itself,” said Visual Arts professor Penn Isengard. “Which should an onlooker choose to focus on? And what if you examined both of them, one after the other?” Isengard praised The New Piece for giving its audience as little direction as possible, ensuring that no two interpretations had anything in common. “All my students feel smart this way. All the better for laying it straight that by the end of the quarter, somebody has to have the right interpretation.” 

Since their installation, the text plaques of The New Piece have faded in and out of existence per passing period. When it was discovered that their contents were describing the exhibits of the Gallery’s past, the Departments of Visual Arts and Literature suspended all class sessions in favor of student-led “prophecies,” where for a letter grade, participants must find a way to manually alter the piece in attempts to “usher in the future faster.” The upcoming exhibit will not be selected until a satisfactory answer is presented. 

“The state of the art department is in flames,” said fourth-year student Scheele Breen. “Those dead pixels that lie in a row on center screen are the only ones that truly live. Free from the mess of having to pretend they know what’s going on, I’ll figure out how to get my future self sent up there to join them.” 

Breen further commented on the extra workload, “This school keeps taking advantage of my willingness to engage and using it as an excuse to display whatever it wants in here. What’s next? Unimaginable shapes from outer space? Chromatic orbs that exist only in the theatre of my mind? I hate that even my anger feeds the industry, and I hate being a critic. It’s just exhausting.” Breen held up an op-ed draft about The New Piece. “But if I stop pointing out the controversy, I’ll become complacent. And that is what kills art.”

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