EXHIBITION

Misappropriations: New Aquisitions

Orange County Museum of Art, California, Newport Beach, 02/15/2015 - 05/24/2015

850 San Clemente Drive

ABOUT

This single gallery exhibition includes approximately two dozen contemporary artworks that share two common characteristics: they have been recently added to OCMA’s permanent collection in the past two years, and all engage with the intertwined themes of topical subject matter, media awareness, and the repurposing of everyday experiences posed by the concurrent exhibitions, Alien She and Fred Tomaselli: The Times. In the most literal sense, the artists in these three exhibitions are each other’s contemporaries; in many cases they are affiliated colleagues living in the same cities, and in some instances, friends.

While the term misappropriation is defined as the misuse of funds or research data, it is applied here as a play on words that slyly references the artistic technique of appropriation, which has spread from being a conceptual tactic for artists in the 1980s—who in turn were adapting principles developed in the 1960s by artists as diverse as Robert Heinecken, (Elaine) Sturtevant and Andy Warhol—to being a near universal artistic language centered on the borrowing, adapting, mixing and fragmenting of already existing streams of visual and textual material. In our fast-moving age of morphing information and media technology, many artists today are less focused on inventing new imagery than in exploring and exposing systems and patterns of meaning that they have individually pieced together from the continuous onslaught of digital data and moving images.

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