The 2022 exhibition Dissolve examined the unstable passage between physical, personal and historical states at UCI’s University Art Gallery.
Curated by Bridget R. Cooks, the exhibition combined loans, works from the Langson Institute and Museum of California Art collection and new projects by Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle and Linda Grass.
Allensworth between settlement and memory
Hinkle’s three-part work THEY: A Temple of Black Personality (Allensworth) combined family photographs and painting to address Allensworth, the first California town founded and governed entirely by African Americans.
Bright colour created a celebratory atmosphere, while fragmented and unstable imagery reflected the settlement’s transformation from living town to historic park.
Water, borders and changing bodies
Grass collaborated with anthropologist Valerie Olson on When We Listen to the Watershed, an installation made from layers of sheer woven cloth. The work traced the Santa Ana River and the ways human intervention rerouted a watershed taken from Native communities.
Ana Teresa Fernández explored femininity and social pressure through three works. Joe Goode addressed human damage to California sunsets and the relationship between painting and photography.
Lia Cook considered what is lost when bodies are digitally reconstructed, while Sonia Romero’s works focused on falling, surrender and the possibility of support.
Other artists included Erica Deeman, Eric Zammitt, Chris Fraser, DeWain Valentine, Helen Pashgian and William Wendt.
Dissolve linked environmental change, historical erasure and personal transformation without treating dissolution only as destruction. Across the exhibition, unstable forms also created the possibility of another state emerging.