octopus

contributors :: volume 4: surface

Chris Balaschak is a PhD candidate in the Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. His writings have been published in Frieze, Art Review, Flash Art, and X-Tra. Chris’s dissertation considers the role photography books play in the depiction and identity of landscape between 1938 and 1977.

Nathan Blake is a PhD candidate in the Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. His dissertation, “Nervous Systems: War-Time Strategies for Bodies in Shock,” historicizes contemporary video games, post-traumatic stress, and combat media by examining World War I and interwar psychoanalysis and therapy, as well as Dada, Brecht, and Artaud. He received an MA in Media Studies at The New School.

Matthew Brandt was born in 1982 in Los Angeles, California. He recently received his MFA degree specializing in photography from UCLA. He now lives and works in Hollywood, CA.

Dr. Julia Bryan-Wilson is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Visual Studies at UC Irvine. Her book Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era will be published in 2009.

James Leo Cahill is a PhD candidate in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California, writing his dissertation, “Une hallucination vrai,” on the early work of avant-garde biological filmmaker Jean Painlevé (c. 1924-1946). He has published several essays and catalog texts on avant-garde film theory and history, and is beginning research for a project on figures of the botanical in moving images and critical theory. In addition to his work with Octopus he is the managing editor for Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies of Media and Culture.

Mark K. Cunningham is a PhD candidate in the Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. His dissertation deals with staged photography and historical reenactment. He also collects vernacular photographs.

Dina Deitsch is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is currently working on a dissertation that examines the overlap of early video art and radical architecture from 1968-1974. She is also Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Dr. Pascale Dubus teaches History of Modern Art at the University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. A specialist in the theory of art and painting of the Italian Renaissance, she has published a monograph on the Sienese painter Domenico Beccafumi (Paris, Adam Biro, translated into English by Vilo International), essays about portraiture, Qu’est-ce qu’un portrait? (Paris: L’art en perspective, 2006), and L’Art et Mort: Réflexions sur le pouvoirs de la peinture a la Renaissance [Art and Death: Reflections on the Powers of Painting in the Renaissance] (Paris: CNRS, 2006). She has also edited the collection Transparences [Transparency] (Paris: éditions de la Passion, 1999) and is currently preparing the French edition of Paolo Pino’s Dialogo di pittura [Dialogue on Painting] (Venice: P. Gherardo, 1548).

Eva J. Friedberg is a PhD candidate in the Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. Her doctoral dissertation, “Action Architecture: Lawrence Halprin’s Experiments in Landscape Design, Urbanism, and the Creative Process,” examines the American landscape architect's development of the RSVP Cycles as an alternative architecture practice in the 1960s. She currently lectures in the Department of Art at the University of San Diego.

Dr. Jennifer A. González is Associate Professor and Chair of the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at UC Santa Cruz. Her writing has appeared in numerous periodicals including Frieze, World Art, Diacritics, Inscriptions, Bomb, Art Journal and in anthologies such as The Cyborg Handbook, and Race in Cyberspace. Professor González has taught at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program since 2002. Her recently published book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008) was awarded an Andrew Wyeth publication grant by the College Art Association.

Krystal R. Hauseur is a PhD candidate in the Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. She specializes in Asian American art and is currently writing on a Nisei fiber artist, Kay Sekimachi. Her research interests are aesthetic politics, ethnographic production and representation, and women’s studies.

Lindsay Holowach is a PhD candidate in European history at the University of Califonia, Irvine. Her dissertation, “Woman in Revolution,” explores the gendered process of modern self-making through the French Revolutionary period in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. As a biography, this project blurs genres while drawing on literary analysis as well as micro-historical methodology. While an undergraduate at Occidental College, she studied history, French, and German and was awarded the highest honor from both the History Department and Language Department. As a graduate student, her work takes her frequently to Paris.

Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst is a PhD candidate at York University’s School of Women’s Studies in Toronto, Ontario and holds a MA in Women’s Studies from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Her graduate research centers on questions of femininity and beauty: her master’s thesis explored queer femininities, and her doctoral dissertation queries the topography of femininity and skin in cosmetic surgery as well as our emotional history of embodiment using interviews, cultural artifacts and psychoanalytic theories. Her other research interests include decolonizing and feminist methodologies and the relationship between grief and pedagogy. Currently, she teaches in the Fine Arts Cultural Studies department at York, and has taught in Social Science and Women’s Studies at York and SFU. Outside of the academy, she facilitates mutual support groups for young adults who have lost a parent or sibling and she is passionate about sewing, mosaic art and printmaking (relief, serigraphic, and intaglio).

Cecilia Joulain is a doctoral student in the Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. Her interests include urbanism, theories of realism in Media Studies, Third Cinema, and hip-hop. Susan M. Kingis a doctoral student in the Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. Her research interests include social constructions of gender and their impact on art and theory, and ther imbrication of politics and art, especially associated with European modern art and the eve of imperialism in the early twentieth century. The subject of her MA thesis at UC Riverside was the reception of German art and theory in England from 1908-1938.

Kelly Kirshtner is a PhD candidate in the Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine, where she is completing a dissertation about sound dynamics entitled "Loose Contact: Microphonic Intensities and Figurative Exchange in Film Sound and Image." She previously received a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and continues to produce video, sound, installation and mixed media work informed by her forays into the sonic field. She currently lectures in Film and Conceptual Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and is a founding editor of Octopus.

Dr. Liz Kotz is a Los Angeles-based art critic and historian. She is the author of Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (MIT Press, 2007), and co-editor, with Eileen Myles, of The New Fuck You (Semiotexte, 1994). She writes on contemporary art and interdisciplinary avant-gardes of the postwar era, including work in experimental film, video and sound-based art. She teaches Modern and Contemporary Art History at UC Riverside, and is the Reviews Editor for Art Journal.

A. Lee Laskin is a doctoral student in the Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. Lee received an honors degree in Philosophy from the University of Victoria as well as a MA in Environmental Studies/Social-Political Thought from York University. He has lectured in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at UC Santa Cruz and the Political Science department at San Francisco State University. He was editor of Continuum Press’s recent book The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction. The working title of his dissertation is “Nocturnal Omissions: The Histories of Night Vision.”

Kate Morris holds a Master of Letters from the University of Glasgow. She has previously published in Invisible Culture, Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review, Fringe Magazine and is the cofounder of The Kelvingrove Review, a post-graduate academic reviews journal. She holds an Honours BA from McGill University, majoring in both Art History and English literature and is an editor at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Dr. David Prescott-Steed is Cultural History and Theory unit coordinator and lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Arts at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He is also a tutor for the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Visual Arts at The University of Western Australia. Recent publications include “Black Sea Abyss: Chaos and Writing in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in TRANS-Revue de littérature générale et comparée (No. 6, ‘Écriture et Chaos,’ Université Sorbonne Nouvelle); “Playing in the Abyss: Generating Potential Space,” in Litera: Journal of Western Literature (21:2, Istanbul Üniversitesi); “Contemporary Mass Media Representation of the Abyssal Zone,” in This Watery World: Humans and the Sea, edited by Vartan P. Messier and Nandita Batra (Mayagüez, Puerto Rico; The Caribbean Chapter of the College English Association Publications, 29-45).

Vanessa Meikle Schulman is a PhD candidate in the Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine, specializing in art of the United States. She holds a BA in American Civilization and History of Art and Architecture from Brown University. Her dissertation examines the representation of laborers, work sites, proto-mass-production techniques, and technology in the nineteenth-century visual culture of the U.S. Vanessa has served in an editorial capacity on Octopus since Volume 2.

James Welling received his MFA from Cal Arts in 1974. He was associated with the “Pictures Generation” that developed in New York around Metro Pictures Gallery in the early 1980’s. In the 1990’s he exhibited extensively in Europe, most notably in Jan Hoet’s 1992 documenta IX in Kassel, Germany. In 1995 Welling became head of the Photography Area in the Department of Art at UCLA. His recent work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Also contributing to Volume 4: Surface are the following filmmakers, whose work is featured on the DVD we've included with each journal. Biographical information about our featured filmmakers can be found on the DVD.

Mary Billyou: 1-9 (2008, 8 mins.)
Eve Heller: Ruby Skin (2005, 3:40 mins.)
Ken Jacobs: Capitalism: Child Labor (2006, 14 mins.)
Michael Metzger: Judgment (2004, 11 mins.)
Leighton Pierce: Fall (2002, 12:20 mins.)
Michael Robinson: Light is Waiting (2007, 11 mins.)
and You Don’t Bring Me Flowers (2005, 8 mins)
Ryan Trecartin: Tommy Chat Just E-mailed Me (2006, 7:15 mins.)

To order a copy of the journal, including the DVD insert, please visit our subscription page.