Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

MCASD Members & UC San Diego faculty and students: FREE

Non-UCSD students and teachers & older adults: $5

General: $15

UCSD students and faculty: Contact nlesley@ucsd.edu from your @ucsd.edu email to get the code for free tickets. UC San Diego ID is required for free entry.

5:30PM: Reception in SME Gallery

6:30PM: Introductions by Kathryn Kanjo and Amy Adler

6:40PM: Russell Lecture by Math Bass

Math Bass (b. 1981, New York, NY) received a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Math Bass: Full Body Parenthesis, Lumber Room, Portland, OR (2024); a picture stuck in the mirror, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle (2021); Hammer Projects: Math Bass, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Math Bass: Crowd Rehearsal, The Jewish Museum, New York (2017); Math Bass: Serpentine Door, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2017); and Off the Clock, MoMA PS1, New York (2015). Their work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Kistefos Museum, Oslo; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China, among others.

Over the past decade, artist Math Bass has developed a lexicon of symbols in the series Newz!—letters, bodily forms, architectural fragments, animals, bones—arranged in a variety of scores, each symbol an empty space of meaning, filled in by the context in which it finds itself. Repetition of these symbols, rather than codifying them into one solid signification, exposes the difference at the heart of each iteration; there is always a gap in meaning, something unnamable left out of and left over in the viewer’s reading—a jouissance. It is this gap in the symbolic where Lee Edelman states queerness lies—not as an easily categorized liberal identity but as a process of unmaking and undoing that leaves (gendered) subjectivity as we know it in question. That these symbols are familiar only heightens our unsettling; the negative space of these compositions, a major player in Bass’s practice, adds further to the gap.

In contrast to older works of gouache on canvas, Bass’s new paintings of oil and linen are more painterly. Whereas quick-drying gouache necessitates a pre-conceived plan, oil allows for the working over of the same material, leaving more of a trace of the artist’s touch; the result is a dreamier depiction of the same symbols, a system in which signs leave even more excess. Visually, it is as though Bass has subjected their own practice to a cybernetic process of learning, and the symbols—having been repeated enough—have begun to form themselves upon the linen, unsure of where they end, fusing together artist and work. In this way, movement and becoming are written into the paintings.

This becoming ties the paintings to Bass’s performance, sound, video, and sculptural works, which track movement through space through kinetic intervention. In all media of their practice, there is an ambivalence that defies easy reading. What does this symbol or this motion signify here? What about there? How would it sound to read it as a musical notation? These questions implicate the viewer in the work, in the process of figuring things out—only to find that there is no certain answer.

For many years, MCASD and the University of California, San Diego have partnered to bring contemporary artists to San Diego through the annual Russell Lecture program. Established through a bequest from Betty Russell, one of MCASD’s founding docents and a long-time supporter of UC San Diego, the lecture was intended to help “foster the appreciation and study of the modern visual arts and creativity of young artists” through support to the Museum and the University.