News Release

Art Meets Engineering at UC San Diego

San Diego, CA, January 9, 2018 -- When artists and engineers collaborate, great things happen. This scenario is playing out yet again at the University of California San Diego. An art exhibit currently showing at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering celebrates a diversity of interdisciplinary artistic practices happening here on campus.

The show, called Indigo, fills the 7th floor of Jacobs Hall and engages audiences with art outside of a traditional gallery setting. This exhibition features pieces created by UC San Diego students, faculty, and alumni from both engineering and artistic fields of study.

The exhibition is supported by a partnership between Dean Albert P. Pisano and the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and Dean Cristina Della Coletta and the UC San Diego Division of Arts and Humanities.

The exhibition is curated by UC San Diego alumni Farshid Bazmandegan. Individuals interested in viewing the exhibit can contact Kate Balderson at kbalderston@ucsd.edu.

Goto FlickrIndigo exhibit opening at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

An excerpt from the Indigo program:

“We know that in order to develop [Jacobs School of Engineering] students who are capable of solving problems, leading, and innovating in a diverse and interconnected world, we must continuously challenge traditional boundaries and drive innovation to whole new levels.

“The Division of Arts and Humanities shares a similar vision, and uses art practice in particular to promote the foundational, transferable, and enduring values of the Humanities and Arts in an increasingly technologized and global society.

“Bringing art into an engineering workspace will inevitably generate new ideas and perspectives, and is an excellent example of how UC San Diego is working towards transforming the student experience, our campus and ultimately humanity itself.”

Ana Andrade

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Work by UC San Diego Visual Arts MFA candidate Ana Andrade

First year UC San Diego Visual Arts MFA candidate Ana Andrade is one of the many artists exhibiting work at Indigo. She studied Communication at the University of Tijuana, and her practice is in photography and video. Her work is about life on planet Earth, which she represents with the human culture, and by the natural world that surround us. Her main practice has been about conducting interactions in different social environments, and through an exploration of invisible particles. Always emphasizing the idea that according to the cultural identities our vital needs change, but we will always be the same species that inhabits this planet. After 8 years of approaching other human beings, Ana got curious about the invisible environment. She started to wonder - how does it look? Are there any other living organism in the surroundings? She wanted to get closer to the minimum part of her depth perception, so she added a new method to her practice: photomicrography.

Kevin Kaufmann

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Work by UC San Diego NanoEngineering PhD candidate Kevin Kaufmann

Kevin Kaufmann, a Jacobs School of Engineering PhD candidate (and alumnus BS ’15, MS ’17), is also featured in the exhibit. Kaufmann is pursuing his Ph.D. in NanoEngineering, and he uses artwork to share his research interest in 3D metal printing, alloy design, and machine learning. Kaufmann was featured in 2017 after winning a Jacobs School art contest.

The two prints from Kaufmann included in Indigo elucidate the microstructure of 3D printed materials utilizing different laser powers and additives in the material. The colors depicted in each picture is determined by three-dimensional crystallographic orientation of the microstructure.

See images and read about the artists and their work in the PDF of the Indigo program, available here.

Indigo features work by:

Katherine Agard, Ana Andrade, Harold Cohen, John Dombroski, Grace Grothaus, Kevin Kaufmann, Abe King, Lei Liang, Eddy Miramontes, Maya Grace Misra, Carolina Montejo, János Négyesy, Jon Paden, Gabi Schaffzin, Rancho Shampoo, Brad Stevenson, Elizabeth Stringer, Shahrokh Yadegari and Pinar Yoldas.

The UCSD Community Stations
Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman

Turin 1911: The World’s Fair in Italy 
Cristina Della Coletta (UC San Diego Division of Arts and Humanities), Filiberto Chiabrando (Politecnico di Torino), Falko Kuester and Dominique Rissolo (Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative)

The Stuart Collection and the University Art Gallery collection
Bruce Nauman, Do Ho Suh, Daniel Buren and Torrie Groening

In Her Eyes
Zhouqun Xu, Hanhui Lou and Yanxi Wang

The opening reception featured a music performance by MFA student John Dombroski at "Fallen Star."

 

 

Exhibition Series

The Indigo exhibition is part of a series of exhibitions using the academic administration space as a place for showing art and engaging with audiences outside of a traditional gallery setting. The three previous exhibitions — Chroma, Mint and Lava — were held at the dean's office of the Division of Arts and Humanities, the office of the Graduate Division and the office of the Executive Vice Chancellor respectively, with support from Dean Cristina Della Coletta, Dean Kit Pogliano and Executive Vice Chancellor Elizabeth H. Simmons.

Media Contacts

Daniel Kane
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-534-3262
dbkane@ucsd.edu