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VALS Presents William Cordova - Oct 28 '09, 7PM - VAF Performance Space
Submitted by yolietorres on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 9:49am.
Events | Student Project
Visual Arts Department Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presents:
William Cordova
October 28th at 7PM
Visual Arts Facility Performance Space, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, California 92093
VALS is pleased to present William Cordova. Cordova’s work is tied to an urban ecology of obsolescence, disparity, and displacement. Busted cars, trashed tires, discarded shoes, machetes, speakers, and books yellowed with age provide the material support and iconographic program for his drawings, collages, and installations. For the artist, these material choices reference the reality of lived experience, as opposed to the spectacle of culture, mass-produced for constant consumption. The fluency with which Cordova traverses media and remixes cultural signifiers confirms his visual multilinguism, as barbed as it is lived-in.
“Cordova has been preoccupied with issues of transformation and interpretation since his youth, owing partly to his own transitions between countries, economies, and languages. Having recently moved from Lima to Miami, the six-year-old found comfort in the sight of what he thought were familiar Peruvian cajón drums scattered on the streets, but which were in fact discarded speaker boxes...Much of Cordova’s work induces similarly uncanny interpretive spirals, abetted not by arbitrary Surrealist juxtapositions but the all-too-common strangeness of our own detritus and the too-often repressed histories they conceal” - SUZANNE HUDSON
Visit us on the web at http://lectures.visarts.ucsd.edu
For more information on the lecture please contact: Suzanne Wright, VALS Coordinator at stwright@ucsd.edu
About the Artist
William Cordova was born in Lima, Peru; raised in Lima and Miami, Florida.
He earned his MFA from Yale University in 2004 and his BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1996.
William has participated in Artist residencies including Artpace, San Antonio, TX; The Core program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Woodstock Center for Photography, NY, The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem; NY and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Main.
Cordova’s solo exhibitions include More than Bilingual, Fleming Museum, Burlington, VA (2009); Moby Dick, Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2008); P’alante, Arndt & Partner, Berlin, Germany (2006); Drylongso (Pichqa Suyo), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); Project Row House, Houston, TX (2005)
Cordova’s work has participated in many group exhibitions including; San Juan Triennial, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2009); Neo-HooDoo, Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Whitney Biennial, NY: Prague Triennial, Czech Republic (2008); Street Level, Duke University, Durham, NC (2007): Scratch, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005) and Utopia Station, 50th Venice Biennale (2003)
Forthcoming projects include a one-person exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (2009); El Espacio Aglutinador, Havana, Cuba (2010). Lastly, curating a large multi-cultural exhibition at Project Rowhouses, Houston, TX (2010).
He currently lives and works New York, Miami and Lima.