The Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine presents para-, a group exhibition of current work by the MFA class of 2021.

Asking what else may lie alongside the subject under examination, each artist’s project pursues a slippery, elusive supplement to its primary discourse.

para-, prefix1 forming miscellaneous terms in the sense ‘analogous or parallel to, but separate from or going beyond, what is denoted by the root word.

parasynthetic adj. /ˌpɛrəˌsɪnˈθɛdɪk/ formed from a combination or compound of two
or more elements; formed by a process of both compounding and derivation.

paraphrase v. transitive. /ˈpɛrəˌfreɪz/ adapt or alter the wording or words of an author
or speaker to suit one's own purpose.

paracellular adj. /ˌpɛrəˈsɛljələr/ located or occurring between or beside cells.

parareligious adj. /ˌpɛrərəˈlɪdʒəs/ existing parallel to, or outside, the sphere
of mainstream religion.

parafiscal adj. /ˌpɛrəˈfɪsk(ə)l/ ancillary to what is fiscal; containing elements not usually regarded as fiscal.

"para-, prefix1". OED Online. December 2019. Oxford University Press.

Eugenia Barbuc approaches work through multimodal conversations that touch upon questions of temporality, video, memory, and queer diasporas.

André Comtois’ dry, multilayered, and gestural large-scale paintings are expanded from observational studies ranging from a variety of media subjects, including internet videos and social media, reformed as iterations once or twice removed. Nods to art historical references and a familiar setting track the artist as the observer of a type of suburban malaise, treading a fine line between boredom and humor.

Tables and walls are ways of presenting and representing. Ian Dolton-Thornton is stacking orientations of object, location, and function. Display formats bump against cosmologies, wherever they come from.

Eric Franco’s work considers the role of religion in diasporic communities on both sides of the border between Mexico and the US. Narrative materials from both nations manifest the effects of religion in colonization, mutation, and migration.

Ivy Guild’s work considers the sinister side of evolutionary survival and environmental justice, speculating on two beings that may endure after the Sixth Great Extinction: AI and fungi. Guild hypothesizes the sympoietic hybridization of these two sentient beings and their incumbent disposal of the primary threat to their domain: human life.

Luis Moreno-Napoles is a facilitator of objects shaped at a distance by women who passed their ethic of handwork into their families. Hand-made meshes in unruly fiber, thickened with nourishing foodstuffs and incorporations of plastic color. The meshes are loose and rough; nets that could keep things together, like the bright matrices of fruit and vegetable sacks that form little stained-glass panes of devotion. If my value(s) can’t be translated for you, will you re-articulate me into your own legibility?

Paired sculptures lapped in a frenzy of come-hither detail: characters from a story of Los Angeles on fire in which the sensitive human, with ears, nose, and throat, is caught between boisterous mechanical guardians of air quality. Benjamin Reiss is thrown into intensive exposition of the inner workings of a couple of appliances – workings already overloaded and fugitive – probing at the origins and operations of knowledge.

Approaching a ditch in southern Colorado, Kelsey Rogers looks at a system for collective management of land, resources, and water. Her work points to the materiality of this site, one of two remaining commons in the United States.

Laura Solomon claims that ‘healing’ is a socially constructed fallacy. She posits alternatives in science fiction, watercolor drawings, sound performance, medical bureaucracy, and a bluegrass hymn. Together they address economic and religious structures that support the erasure of women’s labor and generational translations of violence.