UMM’s third group of exhibitions opened on October 3, 2015, featuring work by Claudia Parducci, Patricia Zarate and Sydney Croskery.

During the opening reception on October 3, 2015, UMM invited participants to create a work titled “On the Translation of Signals,”an art-letter to the local police which will be comprised of 140-character individual messages translated through Morse code. More on this work…

AM Gallery
Patricia Zarate
Slide Slam, detail [ 2015 ]
Acrylic on Slide Frames

Using the obsolete medium of slides, in “Slide Slam,” Zarate eviscerates the film to work on the slide  frame itself, which she hand-paints, conjuring the idea of emptiness in a minimalist composition of blank wall pockets. The emphasis in “Slide Slam,” as well as in other works by Zarate, is on color relationships and on the cumulative effect of individual formal units, how they reconfigure and activate each other with their individual presence. Zarate eschews large heroic gestures, instead using modest materials that she associates with lived experience to build colorful compositions. As the co-founder of Key Projects, an independently-run exhibition space for artists in Long Island City, Queens, NY, Zarate’s mode of working could be construed as a metaphor for artistic community-building. Zarate has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, garnering reviews in ArtNexus, Art News, Newsday, and the Philadelphia Weekly among others.

F Gallery
Claudia Parducci
Three Fatal Sparks [2015]
Site-specific wall installation

Resonating with the record fires in California this summer, Claudia Parducci ‘s “Three Fatal Sparks,” spelled with Morse code on wood-patterned vinyl, addresses what provokes violence and tumult, through the lens of “apocalyptic narratives that sometimes border on the absurd.” Parducci’s work often underlines the unstable qualities of language, intertwined with fear.  She describes her work as being “nurtured by the specter of the marine base near [her] desert home and fed by a steady diet of paranoid Internet browsing through survivalist websites and WWII Morse code transcripts, and a macabre/comic imagination.” Parducci divides her time between Los Angeles and a homesteader’s cabin in the Mojave Desert. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, most recently at Nye + Brown, Garboushian Gallery, Torrance Art Museum, Metro Pictures in NY, as well as in Japan, at  Eitoeiko and Lara Tokyo Gallery.

PR Gallery
Sydney Croskery
Choose Big Good [2015]
Photo collage from archived detritus

For “Choose Big Good,” Sydney Croskery samples a cacophony of junk mail and detritus, directly engaging the ubiquity of overstimulation and the inevitability of everyday consumption. Croskery mixes image and paper fragments to compose a visually stimulating collage integrating analog and digital processes. For this work, which is part of a larger series, Croskery created a digital database for cataloguing her fragments, giving each several keywords and a brief contextual narrative that she can retrieve for her compositions.  Sydney Croskery lives and works in Los Angeles.  Her work has been shown in venues including Raid Projects, LACE, Angles Gallery, 18th Street Center, FOCA, the Torrance Art Museum, and Antena Gallery in Chicago. As a performance artist, Croskery has been invited to present at the Getty Museum, the Deitch Art Parade in NY and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. She is an active member of the LA Art Girls and was one-half of the World Famous Wiener Girls of Chicago.