SAN DIEGO, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego just opened Cerca Series: Amy Adler, Cerca Series: Glenn Kaino and Material Actions at MCASD’s Downtown location. This is the first time that the Museum has presented two simultaneous Cerca Series, MCASD’s popular exhibition program featuring regional, often emerging artists. The exhibitions mark the re-opening of MCASD Downtown’s 1001 Kettner Boulevard space following a brief closure since September 18 for renovations and upgrades including lighting and HVAC improvements as well as reconfigured access to the Museum Store. Material Actions will close on January 28, 2007 and the Cerca Series exhibitions will close on February 4, 2007.

Cerca Series: Amy Adler - Amy Adler creates artworks that fuse the processes and outcomes of photography and drawing. “As far back as I can remember,” she explains, “I've been interested in some sort of negotiation or reconciliation between photography and drawing. I work in both media yet can't say I belong in either.” Adler typically produces photographs of her original drawings, which are in turn based on snapshots of herself and other individual subjects. In these portraits, Adler explores ways in which subjectivity is crafted, consumed, and controlled. She is fascinated by how identity formation is largely dominated by the internalization of supposed opposites, such as self and other, celebrity and anonymity, control and vulnerability. By combining photography and drawing, she extends the subject of her work to her very means of re-presentation, an infinite regress that is at the heart of her artistic project.

For the Cerca Series, Adler presents Director, 2006, a new body of work exhibited for the first time at MCASD. These 12 large-format pastel drawings on canvas are based on a series of photographs Adler took of a young filmmaker directing Adler as the protagonist in her film. This role-reversing scenario begs the question of who is representing whom and further complicates Adler’s mirroring between subject and artist.

The Director series marks many firsts for Adler. This is the first museum exhibition of her drawings, instead of her photographs that look like drawings. It is also the first time Adler has departed from her traditional palette of colors set against black and gray backdrops. The Director drawings are all black pastels laid onto a sparse canvas field—so spare and light, they recall over-exposed photographs shot on a sunny California day. Perhaps most importantly, Director marks the first appearance of a movie camera in Adler’s work. The camera dominates the composition of all of the drawings and vies with the girl as the protagonist. In fact, the girl never makes eye contact with the viewer—her eyes are only visible in two of the drawings—but Adler repeatedly directs the camera outside the picture frame implicating the viewer in her complex and contradictory game of identity exchange.

Cerca Series: Glenn Kaino - Los Angeles-based artist Glenn Kaino creates sculptures that show a fascination with Rube Goldberg machines, history, and quantum physics. Kaino’s often-humorous conceptual objects and installations attract the viewer with immediately recognizable forms that comment on their surroundings and engage a large network of cultural references. In his work, Kaino often demonstrates affinities between seemingly unrelated ideas.

MCASD has commissioned Kaino to create new works for the Cerca Series. Revolving around the premise that “Laws are Made for Rogues,” Kaino will create installations dealing with issues of individual versus group identity and aesthetic style as a form of social commentary, using ninjas, pirates, and Zapatistas as his protagonists. In popular culture, the strength of an anonymous individual ninja is almost impenetrable whereas groups of ninjas are easily dispatched by weaker opponents. The inverse is true for pirates, whose strength is as a flamboyantly dressed mass, often forcing the lone individual to walk the plank. Kaino conflates these premises, using toy Zapatista dolls that emulate ninja dress and a two-headed pirate boat outfitted with planks for each pirate, to explore the popular expectations of good versus bad, strong versus weak that are communicated through aesthetic choices.

Kaino was born and raised in Los Angeles. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Irvine and his M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. Kaino’s work has been shown at the Asia Society, New York; Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; The Studio Museum, New York; and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He was a co-founder of Deep River Gallery in Los Angeles, a pioneering artist-run exhibition space, was Chief Creative officer of Napster, and has taught at UCLA and USC.

Material Actions - Material Actions features key sculptural works from MCASD’s permanent collection that give the sentient body in action a central position in their artistic discourse. Sculpture by Bruce Conner, Martin Puryear, David Hammons and Petah Coyne, together with works on paper by Sophie Calle and Nigel Poor explore the physical qualities of materials and their transformation and perception by the body’s senses in a variety of ways.

While in craft tradition the body of the creator and her or his actions are assumed as fundamental to the process of artistic production, 20th-century Modernism’s focus on form rather than process obscured and even denied the importance of the body as a source of aesthetic meaning. During the 1960s artists like Bruce Conner began again to focus on process, utilizing their own bodies as a catalyst for material changes through performances occurring in real time. This radical reconfiguration of what constitutes the subject and object of art permeated Conner’s object-based production. Resurrection (1960), an important piece from MCASD’s collection, results from actions like gathering, layering, and entwining the richly weathered and textured found materials of which it is made. These actions, in turn, imply the artist’s positioning of his own body as a sensate instrument that arrives at highly poetic, conceptual narratives through doing.

The focus in bodily activity as a form of artistic address, and as the content of art, is particularly evident in the work of David Hammons, an artist who took the action-based practice of the 1960s and turned it towards a critique of race and identity. Made from objects found in one of his constant walks through the streets of his native Harlem, Hammons’ sculpture Champ (1989) articulates an important sub-theme in this exhibition—the allusion to skin and the sense of touch. In this work, a piece of black, rubber inner tube with boxing gloves attached with masking tape hangs limply, like flayed skin from a nail. The piece, which results from the action of walking in the city, also documents another kind of performance—that of race and its bodily identification.

The artists in Material Actions engage their senses through actions and performances that vary from gathering materials as meditation, hand-crafting as a form of self identification, and the categorization of other people’s bodies, to processes that highlight socially constructed identities. All, however, give preeminence to lived experience; to acting and making in the world over the formal and representational autonomy of the art object.