EVENT DETAILS

UCI VISITING ARTIST LECTURE SERIES presents: Ravi GuneWardena and Miles Coolidge with Respondent: Bert Winther-Tamaki

Please join us for a double artist lecture by Ravi GuneWardena and Miles Coolidge, who will each speak on their individual work in ikebana and photography, respectively, with a response by Bert Winther-Tamaki.

Register Here:
https://uci.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIrc-2pqDIqHd0TQFIhxtxgvzvHG1dNzQVK

All are welcome!

Ravi GuneWardena, an architect by profession, is a practitioner of Sogetsu Ikebana, studying under ikebana teacher Haruko “Gyokushun” Takeichi, Riji, Overseas Eiyo Syo, Sogetsu School. He is a member of the Sogetsu Men’s Class, founded by Kaz Yokou Kitajima in 2012 in preparation for the Sogetsu Seminar the following year. Developing his practice as an ikebana artist over the past 15 years, GuneWardena worked simultaneously on learning the essential curriculum of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana and on researching the history of the school and its headmasters. As an architect and half of Escher Gunewardena Architecture, he and his partner Frank Escher has collaborated with artists such as Sharon Lockhart, Mike Kelley, and Stephen Prina; and designed exhibitions for the Carnegie International, LACMA, and the Kemper Museum. In 2013 they created the site-specific chamber opera, “ Pauline," based on the letters of Pauline Schindler, for the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles.

Miles Coolidge's artwork is often concerned with subject matter at the intersection of landscape and architecture. His work gained international visibility in the mid-1990's, standing out as a synthesis of his exposure to the post-studio ethos of his California Institute of the Arts experience as an MFA student, and his year of DAAD-supported post-graduate study in the class of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His work has been shown internationally, including at venues such as NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Projekt Fabrika, Moscow; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; the Shanghai Museum of Art, China, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, the Albright-Knox Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 and is Professor of Art at UC Irvine. 

Bert Winther-Tamaki’s scholarship focuses on the role of the visual arts in the construction of modern meanings of materials, especially in twentieth-century Japan. His forthcoming book TSUCHI: An Environmental History of Contemporary Japanese Art follows the plight of earthy materials such as loam, landfill, beach sand, potter’s clay, and riverbank pebbles in ceramics, photography, and installation art in Japan since the 1950s. Much of Winther-Tamaki’s work has focused on artists whose positions partly outside Japan complicated the artistic identities they developed in various media. He is the author of Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years (2001) and Maximum Embodiment: Yoga, the "Western Painting" of Japan, 1910-1955 (2012). Winther-Tamaki is Professor of  Visual Studies, and Art History and Chair in the Department of Art History at UC Irvine.

Co-sponsored by Department of Art & Department of Asian American Studies

Presented in conjunction with Towards a Raw Materialism: Patty Chang, Miles Coolidge, Ravi GuneWardena, and David Kelley, xMPL Theater (in collaboration with University Art Gallery), UC Irvine.

Organized by Simon Leung
Project assistants: Zack Benson, Hiroshi Clark

For further information, please contact leungss@uci.edu

This project is generously supported by UCI Illuminations.