SAN DIEGO, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is showing two new exhibitions featuring two distinct, singular voices. Rita McBride: Public Tilt and This is How We Walk on the Moon: Colter Jacobsen opened simultaneously at MCASD Downtown. Rita McBride’s exhibition comprises three major installation pieces that fill the Foster, Farrell, and Strauss galleries. San Francisco-based artist Colter Jacobsen’s practice explores the workings of time and memory through intimate drawings and assemblages.

Rita McBride: Public Tilt
through February 8, 2015
Rita McBride: Public Tilt features three installations by the artist whose work engages the tropes of architectural design, modernist sculpture, and public space. Installed in the expansive volumes of MCASD’s downtown location, Public Tilt includes the West Coast debut of McBride’s celebrated modular construction, Arena. When assembled, Arena forms a massive tiered stadium-like structure, which has been programmed with activities throughout the course of the exhibition. The sculpture’s space, both the bleacher-like seating and the implied stage, is activated by the public, who climbs, gathers, views, and meets inside of the piece.

If Arena’s arcing design provides a welcoming embrace, then National Chain offers a halting counterpoint. Here, a grid of metallic units, a “dropped ceiling,” is suspended from the rafters. The seemingly fallen plane creates a kind of architectural tide line, which rests at torso-height creating an obstructive horizon. McBride’s consideration of architecture, art, and forms of display, continues in her revised presentation of the rattan sculpture, Toyota, which is being presented on a newly designed angled pedestal.

Rita McBride (Des Moines, Iowa, U.S.A.) lives and works between Düsseldorf, Germany, and Los Angeles, California. She studied at Bard College, New York, and received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Since 2003 she has been a professor at The Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, where she was recently appointed Director.

This is How We Walk On the Moon: Colter Jacobsen
through February 8, 2015
Colter Jacobsen’s evocative graphite drawings and found object installations serve as meditations on memory and forgetting, seeing and blindness, lust and longing. One of Jacobsen’s frequently used strategies is to draw one version of a photograph while viewing it and a second entirely from memory. Other works begin on the street, with city-based wanderings, where he takes photographs and procures the ephemera that finds its way into his collages and assemblages. In this, his first solo museum exhibition, the San Francisco-based, San Diego-born artist presents new work inspired by his recent travels by foot and train along the coast of California, together with a selective survey of related works made over the past ten years.

Jacobsen was born in Ramona, California, and lives and works in San Francisco. His work has been shown in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe, with recent exhibitions at venues including Corvi-Mora, London (2013); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); Galerie Krizinger, Vienna (2010); LA>