Spring 2017

Ian Faloona, Associate Professor, Associate Bio-micrometeorologist, Dept of Land, Air, & Water Resources, UC Davis // “The Universality of our Fluid Motions: An Experiment in Geophysical Dance”

Ian Faloona studied physical chemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and conducted summer research in computational chemistry at Los Alamos National Lab. He then earned a Ph.D. in meteorology from Pennsylvania State University. After a postdoc in the Advanced Study Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, he joined the faculty at UC Davis. Over the past two years, he has been teaching a course that explores the relationship between human movement and the fluid motions on the rotating Earth. The ostensible goal of the course, aside from fostering novel modes of creativity, is to build a physical and visceral relationship between each individual and the greater Earth system, deepening comprehension of our relationship to the environment as manifested in the great fluid motions of sea and sky. He will discuss some of the preliminary findings of these experiments and search for improved questions to ask for future experiments. http://www.faloona.lawr.ucdavis.edu

Alison O’Daniel, Visual Artist & Filmmaker, Los Angeles, CA // “Quasi Closed-Captions: The Tuba Thieves”

Alison O’Daniel works across film, sculpture, performance, and music, inviting audiences and collaborators to navigate, de-construct, and re-imagine sound. She foregrounds the deaf and hard of hearing experience through process, collaboration, and material. In her current film, The Tuba Thieves, rather than having a composer respond to filmic imagery, the film is composed of narrative film, performance, and sculptures based on commissioned musical scores made in response to an epidemic of tuba thefts occurring in Los Angeles high schools. She has presented solo exhibitions at Art In General, New York; and Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles, to name a few. Writing on O’Daniel’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Los Angeles Times, and ArtReview. O’Daniel received a BFA in Fibers and Material Studies from the Cleveland Institute of Art, a Post-graduate Diploma of Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a MFA in Studio Art from UC Irvine. http://www.alisonodaniel.com

Chris Fraser, Artist, San Francisco, CA // “The Tethered Image”

Chris Fraser is an artist who makes perceptual apparatuses and environments modeled on historic image-making technologies. To Fraser, photographs are unbound by the time and place of their origin, able to meet anyone, anywhere, at any time. Though much is gained through this freedom, distance is placed between the objects of the world and the images we make of them. Through his work with apparatuses such as the camera obscura, he puts objects and their images back in dialog with each other, sacrificing broad distribution for an experience of image that is local and ephemeral. His talk will focus on the relationship between objects and images, and how images are regarded when they are physically tethered in space and time to their object, and the shifts that occur when the two drift apart. Fraser teaches photography at Mills College in Oakland, CA. His talk will be accompanied by a live demo in a dark theater. http://www.chrisfraserstudio.com