UCI Visiting Artist Lecture Series (VALS)

Katie Grinnan

Tuesday, Feb. 13, 12 p.m. PST

Contemporary Arts Center, Colloquium Room, 3rd Floor

This talk will be held in-person and live streamed on Zoom (see link details below) 

The Department of Art presents the Visiting Artist Lecture Series (VALS). The annual series, organized by graduate students in Art, invites artists, scholars, curators, critics, gallerists and writers to give public lectures and conduct studio visits with students relevant to graduate students' research and practice. The series will be in-person and live streamed. There will be drinks and dinner after the lecture on CAC 4th floor. Please visit the VALS webpage for links and information on other events in the series.

About the Artist

Katie Grinnan (b. U.S. 1970) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles and received her M.F.A. from U.C.L.A. Grinnan’s work stems from the body, specifically the relationship between visual, kinesthetic and cognitive experience, and the way these different knowledge systems affect one’s perception of reality and sense of self. 

In the early 2000’s, she began working with the relationship between photography and sculpture and thought about the body as a kind of architecture, wrestling with the disjunction between vision/representation /interpretation and physicality. These works often compressed the distance between the body and its focal points, so photos acted as skins of sight/site, becoming a sculptural material. These explorations later gave way to an investigation of the temporal aspects of the body, privileging elasticity and performance over a static entity. Many of her sculptures use performed gestures as a system of movement, where she casts her body in all the possible positions, so the entire motion is seen as a singular form, yet simultaneously occupies cinematic space.

These mapped motion systems are often in conversation with mapped data systems from different ideological frameworks, ranging from astrology charts to EEG diagrams. These diagrams are often translated into instruments, sounds, scores, and choreographies, favoring experiential and somatic interpretations of the information. Recently her focus has incorporated various states of consciousness such as meditation and dreaming, and most recently, the decentered neural network of an octopus, which was the subject of her most recent exhibition in 2022 at Commonwealth and Council gallery, titled Synapse. In Synapse the embodied brain was conceptualized as a field of perception and response which extends beyond the individual.

Her work has been exhibited widely at venues including the Whitney Museum in New York, MOCA in Los Angeles, the MAK Center in Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Diverse Works in Houston, Modern Art Oxford in the UK, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, and Kunstverein Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin.  She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship, and most recently a COLA fellowship among many other awards. Grinnan's work is in the collections of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles. She is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, where she is currently program head of the Sculpture/ New Genres area.

katiegrinnan.com

VALS is presented with generous support from The Claire Trevor Society, the CTSA Dean's Fund for Excellence, and UCI Illuminations.. 

For remote access: 

Zoom Link

Time: Tuesday, Feb. 13, 12 p.m. PST