June 7 - 27, 2003   "Wipe Your Feet"   Group exhibition features photography, digital works, and paintings by young artists ages 17 - 23.   Amanda Alfieri, Esperanza Barajas, Norma Barajas, Mando Blanco, Hector Flores, Christopher Harris, Taizet Hernandez, Ana Lopez, Franco Marino, Ana Rodriguez   All of the work was produced by youth attending the Portfolio Production Workshop at REACH LA, a non-profit community organization, under the Direction of Gina Lamb. The workshop was part REACH LA's on-going arts and technology programming, which offers free hands-on technical and artistic training in digital video, animation, digital arts publishing, and graphic and web design, and art foundation for inner-city youth.   A cadre of young REACH LA artists from the Portfolio Production workshop now want to pursue serious careers in the arts. This group applied for and received a California Arts Council "Next Generation" grant to mount a visual exhibition of their artwork. Topics range from queer ghetto cyber girls on-line, teen girls wrestle with Catholicism, and dress identity of boy paperdolls.   The mission of REACH LA is to design and operate youth-driven programs to improve the health and wellbeing of urban youth, and to help them transition to successful adulthood. REACH LA was founded in 1992 by four women artists and activists with the vision that REACH LA build a working partnership between urban teenagers and artists, where youth could design ways to address pertinent social issues through creative means. For more information on REACH LA, visit the website www.reachla.org or contact Ana Lopez (213))622-1650 ex104.   In conjunction with the exhibition, Track 16 will host "The Chorizo Show" on Friday, June 27 at 8:00. A little bit of everything cooked up by the REACH LA Youth Arts Collective including spoken word and music, video pieces and audio documentaries and featuring a performance by Latina Lesbian girl band, Jarritos De Miel, a.k.a. The Honeypots, is an all-lesbian Latina band.. Original Songs written for women with carefully defined with musical Harmonies from ballads, to alternative pop. Admission will be $5.00. Seating is limited. RSVP to TRACK 16 (310)264-4678.   June 5 - 14, 2003   "Happy Beautiful Desirable"   The Studio Art Department of University of California at Irvine proudly presents the work of its Master of Fine Arts candidates at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica. Ten artists will exhibit paintings, photography, installation and performance from June 5th to 14th. A reception will be held on Saturday June 7th from 6 to 10 pm, and Friday the 13th, will be a Track 16 Nights presentation of the exhibiting artists speaking about their art as a Happy Beautiful Desirable practice.   Leilani Chan will be presenting her first gallery based video installation entitled "Living on Rivers, Oceans & Clouds." Utilizing footage collected on family a trip to Laos, this two channel installation explores the rebuilding of family after the ruins of war. It exposes a country still trying to recover from the Vietnam War and reveals diasporic conflicts between privilege and poverty, memory and reality, and the desire to reconstruct and reclaim a family's history lost due war. Chan is an award-winning performance artist, playwright and Founding Artistic Director of TeAda Productions. She wrote and directed "Native Immigrant," an epic performance infused with stories of 20 multicultural artists; presented "Jungle Stories/ 1898/2000" at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder; and tours the country with her one woman show "E Nana I Ke Kumu, Look to the Source."   David Dahliun Khang brings to his art practice a varied educational background, including psychology, theology, dentistry, and architecture. He is currently working on his MFA with an Emphasis in Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. Khang has participated in "Bridge", Brooks Design Center at The Cooper Union, N.Y. (1999), "Hong-Ik Street Exhibition", Seoul (1999), "Ides of March", Hyperspace, Vancouver (2001), "Smoking Mirrors", Kinross Gallery, Los Angeles, and most recently, "Irrational Exhibits 2", Track 16, Los Angeles. Khang's work plays with language to explore the relationships between speech, writing and image-making. His most recent body of work uses dismembered organs of speech to explore the uncanny experience of disembodiment and the pervasive violence in and through language.   Ignacio Lopez's main interests focus on the hegemony of semiotic or linguistic discourse over past and current interpretations of Art. His work poses a challenge to the limits of the representable. His objects of art, his "artifacts," try to escape the mere decorative and "signic" character, and propose Art for the sake of its "being experienced.." His work coming to the U.S. looks at how language becomes a tool for cultural dominion. For this exhibition he presents a video-installation that deals with issues of "communication" and "power." Ignacio is a current graduate student in the Fine Arts Faculty of Granada, Spain and was invited to attend UCI's Studio Art Graduate Program.   Maria Molina's work, a Spanish graduate student from Granada, invited to attend UCI's Studio Art Graduate Program, is mainly focused in the use of body as an expressive tool. A performative producer of meaning, where it becomes a physical platform to project personal issues, like feelings, experiences, frights, desires, etc. For this show, Maria will be showing her new video work, a slow motion-video projection. Where she simultaneously explores issues, like the perceptive use of light and color, recreating a peaceful experience into a poetic space.   Ruben Ochoa's current work examines the unnatural nature around us by fusing an aggressively rooted ficus tree with concrete. Echoing man-made suburban settings, the displaced ficus tree uproots its false gallery flooring, disrupting and unmasking the fa溝de and artificiality of both its natural environments. Ochoa will be showing his current works in a town near you. For more information visit abstractmachine.com at http://www.abstractmachine.com/aboutclassc.html,   Glynnis Reed graduated from Occidental College as a Studio Art major.. She is a multimedia visual artist, working in photography, painting, and collage. She has exhibited her work in diverse spaces throughout Los Angeles, including Watts Towers, UCLA, Occidental College, and Highways Performance Space. Glynnis creates work that explores issues of identity and place and is interested in the ways social environments shape our notions of the self.   Pedro Tavera was born, raised and is working in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from Otis College of Art. He spent the spring and summer of 1998 at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He is finishing his MFA at UCI. He currently collaborates at "Slanguage," a venue comprised of three other partners in Wilmington, CA.   Holly Topping is recently been exploring ideas of self portraiture and autobiography. Her paintings are delivered in a dead pan neoclassical style. By reanimating pictures from photos of herself in paint she harkens issues of death and mourning. Holly Topping shows in Los Angeles and has shown in New York and Kansas City.   Henry Tsang's video installation with four monitors explores the uncanny relationship between Orange County, CA, and Orange County, China. A Beijing developer has hired Orange County architects and interior designers to create an "authentic" American-style gated community near the site of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Is this an example of cultural hybridity, appropriation or colonization? Exotica or simply just another franchise opportunity? What happens to the American Dream when it is translated into Chinese? This work offers insight into the confluence of urban design, politics and global capital. Henry Tsang's installations and photography have been exhibited internationally.   Jesse Webber received his bachelor of fine arts from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 2001 with an emphasis in painting and is currently completing his masters of fine arts at the University of California Irvine. His thesis project takes the form of several large-scale fiberglass sculptures, which aim to reinterpret the connections and relationships between modernisms that occur in painting, sculpture, industrial design, architecture and everyday life. The work fuses together aesthetics ranging from cool Los Angeles formalism to low down dirty southern hotrod style.. Simultaneously yearning for utopian idealism and accepting the failures that occur when ideals are put into practice, the work functions as autobiography, social metaphor and unapologetic object.