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Art

Lanfranco installation featured at NYC gallery
“Ursus Horribilis,” an installation by Katerina Lanfranco (Kresge College, Art, 2001), was exhibited at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City from September 9 to October 18. Lanfranco spent a year working on the solo show named for the Latin or scientific name for the grizzly bear. The installation featured two major oil paintings and a sculptural environment or diorama seen behind a vitrine in the style of a Museum of Natural History presentation. The installation, which is 8 feet high and more than 18 feet wide, addresses the intersection between nature and culture, a primary concern in Lanfranco’s work.

Photo: Stephen Thorsett
Katerina Lanfranco spent a year working on “Ursus Horribilis,” which was exhibited at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City from September 9 to October 18.

Lanfranco began working on dioramas as a UCSC undergraduate.  Always interested in nature and the world in which we live, she worked at the Royal Ontario Museum, a natural history museum in Toronto in the entomology department, classifying moths, based on visual similarities and differences, organizing them and putting them into a sequence.  In “Ursus Horribilis” Lanfranco joins her interest in science and the natural world with myth of the grizzly bear.

Lanfranco’s work has been shown at Hunter College Times Square Gallery, New York; Artists Space, New York; Fahnemann Projekte, Berlin; Altman Building, New York; Hunter College, New York; and Kresge Town Hall.  Her work is included in numerous collections, including Kupferstichkabinett Museum of Prints and Drawings, Berlin; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawing Collection.

 


One of five murals painted by Porter College alum Erin Tajime Castelan.

Alum paints murals in San Jose medical center waiting rooms
Erin Tajime Castelan (Erin Kathleen O'Donnell, Porter College, Art, 1993) has completed six murals in five pediatric waiting rooms in Kaiser Santa Teresa's Family Health Center at Highway 85 and Cottle Road in south San Jose. The colorful murals feature a variety of themes and subjects, including Huck Finn and San Jose’s Kelley Park, as well as underwater, safari and beach scenes.

Digital Arts and New Media

Recent grads participate in ISEA 2006, ZeroOne San Jose
Two recent DANM graduates, Michella Rivera-Gravage and Daniel Massey, participated in the Thirteenth International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA2006) and ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge in August. Rivera-Gravage served as an associate producer of the symposium and festival. Meanwhile, Massey’s work “Autoturista,” made of visual, tangible and sonic artifacts from the Mexicali/Calexico border crossing, was exhibited.

Rivera-Gravage’s most recent work, “TrainTracks,” is a perpetually unfolding collection of downloadable audio programs sewn together to poetically convey the intricacies of sociality in the confined spaces of public transport on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART).

Born in Mexicali, Massey works in the mediums of sound, video, installation, and performance. His projects reflect an interest in the way our sense of interiority is constructed and negotiated in relation to public structures of interaction and traversal.

DANM faculty members Elliot Anderson, Sharon Daniel, Ed Osborn and Margaret Morse also participated in ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose. Anderson, an assistant professor of art, presented a poster session titled “Unnatural Selection,” which he produced in collaboration with DANM graduate students Tyler Freeman, Adam Jerugim, James Khazar, Nichole Smith, Synthia Payne, no.e sunflowrfish and Alan Tollefson. The series of projects in “Unnatural Selection” examined human and cultural understanding of and in relationship to the natural environment. Daniel’s “Palabras,” an interactive exhibition of videos created in a series of workshops at cultural centers in two impoverished shantytowns in Buenos Aires and in a workshop in San Jose, also was shown. Daniel, a professor of Film and Digital Media, also presented a paper titled “Public Secrets: information and social knowledge.” Osborn’s “Wandering Eye,” an interactive video installation that produced images and sounds from video input gathered by an array of lenses in motion, was shown evenings at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Osborn, assistant professor of art, also participated in a SoundCulture panel discussion. SoundCulture is an international collective doing sound-related work that explores artistic and cultural contexts for this work outside of the traditional modes of presentation of music. Morse, DANM chair and professor of Film and Digital Media, served as a member of the International Program Committee for ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose.

Ramirez participates in LA festival, UCSB conference
Christopher Angel Ramirez, a recent Digital Arts and New Media M.F.A. graduate, performed “Color Bonita” at the FUSION Los Angeles LGBT People of Color Film Festival in early December. The interactive performance piece blends new media documentary with a forum for conversation in a work that focuses on the struggles of gay Latino men.

Ramirez also participated in a conference titled “Activist Scholarship: Documenting Undocumented Border Space” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in October.

Film and Digital Media

Morgan to return to Santa Cruz for Rio Theater screening
Ben Morgan (Merrill College, Psychology, 1991) will be back in Santa Cruz on January 19 for the screening of his feature film, Quality of Life, at the Rio Theater. Filmed in San Francisco’s Mission District, the film focuses on talented and prolific graffiti writers Michael "Heir" Rosario and Curtis "Vain" Smith. The pair begins writing their names on the urban landscape at age 10 and a decade later they’ve evolved into a team of brilliant street artists. When the pair is arrested, their identities are revealed and their creative outlets dwindle abruptly. Faced with the prospect of jail time, Heir and Vain struggle to maintain their creative passion and lifelong friendship as each chooses his future path.

Quality of Life received a Special Mention at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2004. That year it was also screened at the Seattle International Film Festival, the Cinequest Film Festival, and the Stockholm International Film Festival.

Morgan is expected to visit a Film and Digital Media class while he is in Santa Cruz for the screening.

Theater Arts

Boyes helps launch SciFi magazine
Walt Boyes (Stevenson College, Theater Arts, 1974), who in his day job is a nonfiction writer, editor and business analyst, participated on the creative team that launched Jim Baen's Universe in June 2006. JBU, which began online and moved to a physical edition, is published bimonthly at www.baensuniverse.com, and its CD edition is sold through specialty bookstores. Boyes has been associate editor and marketing director since the magazine's inception, and because of the UCSC connection, UCSC's McHenry Library was the first library to receive a free subscription to the magazine. He participates as a member of the editorial board, and also, as marketing director, in the operating committee of the magazine.

Boyes also has been appointed to the Board of Directors of a new project connected to the Baen Free Library (www.baen.com/library). This year a nonprofit foundation called the Science Fiction Public Library debuted to provide unencrypted ebooks to disabled readers worldwide, and to provide a place for midlist writers to ensure that their works never go "out of print." One of the very last things science fiction editor and publisher Jim Baen did before his death in June 2006 was to provide for the Baen Free Library to be used as the seed for the Science Fiction Public Library, according to Boyes.

Boyes’s primary day job is editor in chief of the award-winning technical trade magazine Control and its array of digital products, including its website, www.controlglobal.com. Control has won numerous awards for both editorial and design excellence, and is the leading publication in the process automation and control engineering marketplace, Boyes says.

Boyes also is a partner in Spitzer and Boyes LLC, www.spitzerandboyes.com, which does business consulting and analysis for technical companies, as well as publishing the "Consumer Guide to..." series of analytical volumes on field sensors and control systems. He is also the editor of the Instrumentation Reference Book, 3rd Edition and co-author of eBusiness in Manufacturing.

Next year two of Boyes’s science fiction and fantasy stories will be published—"That'll Be the Day" in Ring of Fire II Anthology, edited by Eric Flint, Baen 2007; and "Midsummer Nightmare" in Something Magic This Way Comes Anthology, edited by Sarah A. Hoyt, DAW, 2007.

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