Spring 2022

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Hillel at UCLA

574 Hilgard Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90024

 310-208-3081, ext. 108

Free and open to the public

Gallery Hours: Monday through Friday, 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

Student Fine Art Show

Thursday, May 19th, 6-8PM

Hillel at UCLA will be having the Student Fine Art show opening in the Spring quarter of 2022. We invite all undergraduate students to participate in the contest and share their beautiful ideas and artistic work with Hillel and the public. We want students to have the liberty to create anything possible with their imagination so submissions can be anything. *No nudity* In previous years, we received paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, even collages, and strange and exotic pieces of work, and many more so we encourage students to get creative and get motivated! We will be giving out prizes to the winning students.

"The Phylliss and Lou Mann Prize for Excellence in the Arts at UCLA Hillel"

1st prize: $1000
2nd prize: $500

Student submissions will be received at the front desk of Hillel, 574 Hilgard Ave, in care of Perla Karney, March 1st – 18, 10am- 4pm.

Curator will make final selections.  Exhibition opens March 28 and closes May 20, 2022.  

Closing reception & award ceremony Thursday, May 19, 6-8pm.  Curator and juror will be present.  

Curated by Patty Wickman,

Professor, UCLA Department of Art

Carmen Argote, Prize Juror

Contact Perla for additional information:
[email protected] | (310) 208-3081 Ext. 108

Generously funded by Mindy and Robert Mann & the Stratton-Petit Foundation 

About the Judge: Carmen Argote

Carmen Argote is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Argote’s process-based practice is derived from her environment, often pointing to the body, to class, and to economic structures in relation to architecture and personal history. The act of walking and movement is an integral part of her practice and transforms the body into her studio. carmenargote.com

Student Photo Contest

-Diversity and Inclusion-

Fall 2022

Cathy Weiss

Margaret Lazzari

Lisa Levine

PAST TENSE

All photographs are about death. Like a program running invisibly in the background of a computer, the presence of death is in every photograph and it drives the creation of all photographs. Our desire to capture and hold onto fleeting moments of life and the fleeting presence of those we share our lives with drives us to release the shutter. This is, in turn, a life-affirming act; the photograph, a life- affirming artifact. The critic John Berger has argued that photographs represent an “opposition to history” by affirming the subjective experiences of ordinary people, “so hundreds of millions of photographs, fragile images, are used to refer to that which historical time has no right to destroy.” 

Photography is also a powerful mechanism for constructing and/or reconstructing memory. In the PAST TENSE series I use old photographs from family albums as well as found photographs as a starting point for my digitally constructed images. I do not know the identities of most of the photographs’ subjects or the photographers who made them. I’m interested in the way these photographs can create narratives and memories that are differentiated from actual experience. At some point in time the photograph can become a substitute for experience itself, creating memory in response to itself rather than the experience from which the photograph was made.

 I’m particularly interested in the unselfconsciousness of the photographers who made these snapshots that hold no pretense of artfulness. Using the opening and closing of a shutter the photographers summed up all of his/her impressions of the moment, of a life. The photographs are a beautiful and tragic response to a moment in time quickly passing from existence. In making these pictures the photographers were paying homage to the life of their subjects, many now long forgotten, as well as to their own lives through the expression of that which was impressed upon them. 

I have used these images as a starting point for my constructions, layering images from the past with those of the present. I use a "digital drawing" process to combine my photographs with the vintage images. I layer many photographs together and then begin to strip away parts of those layers revealing some aspects of current photographs combined with aspects of the vintage ones. The process for me becomes a form of drawing with photographic data, blurring the lines of distinction between digital photography and drawing; it is a way to ritualize commemoration of the individuals in the photographs and the photographers who responded to them. I’m as interested in the impulse to make the photograph as I am in the people pictured. For me, each person pictured in these photographs calls out, “remember me” as the photographer responds, “remember how I experience this moment and you.” 

I draw my inspiration from these vintage vernacular photographs. For me, they allow an entrance into other lives, times and places. These re-imaginings echo parts of a story of lives gone by. My work pays homage to the people I feel I’ve come to know through their photographs and to the powerful impulse to immortalize them on the part of the photographers who captured them long ago.

The Dortort Center Galleries are located at Hillel at UCLA. The public is invited to view our exhibits Monday through Friday from 10:00am to 4:00pm (or at other times by special request) when school is in session.

For questions, please contact Perla Karney at 310-208-3081 x108 or [email protected]