The Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Art, Honors and Recognition has brought three outstanding art exhibits to the UCSF campus community:

• "Clay into Bronze" by Peter Voulkos ( Kalmanovitz Library)
• "Ocean Mirrors with Fragments" by Jim Campbell (Saunders Court)
• "Truth is I am You" by Hank Willis Thomas and Ryan Alexiev (installed along the walkway between the School of Nursing and the School of Dentistry)

Peter Voulkos: Clay into Bronze

Peter Voulkos (1924-2002) is acknowledged as one of the 20th Century's most important innovators in the visual arts. Voulkos experimented with large-scale abstract ceramic sculpture, taking clay beyond its use for utilitarian objects.

In the early 1990s, Voulkos began to make molds from some of his works in clay. His intent was to create works that expressed both the depth of glazed ceramic and evidence of the artist's hand, along with the durability and toughness of bronze. These brilliantly detailed bronze castings with mottled patinas have been compared to the refined surfaces of traditional Chinese bronze sculptures.



From 1959 until his retirement in 1985, Voulkos taught at the University of California, Berkeley. The nine pieces in the exhibition represent work created throughout his career from 1959 to 2000 and are on loan courtesy of the Estate of Peter Voulkos and the Braunstein Quay Gallery, San Francisco. They are on exhibit through February 20, 2009.

Jim Campbell: Ocean Mirror with Fragments

Located in Saunders Court, Ocean Mirror with Fragments consists of an approximately five-foot-square grid of 100 glass blocks mounted onto a low concrete footing installed within the green area on the east side of the courtyard. The artwork is set into the middle of the green, so that the plants will grow around and in front of the work. There are white LED lights mounted within each glass block controlled by an electronic circuit to create an overall moving image of ocean waves. The ocean image displayed is from a video taken directly west of the artwork's location of the Pacific Ocean creating a mirror back to the ocean. The further away one is from the grid, the more the image is readable.

Single glass blocks will be scattered within the green area near the large video, each synchronized to a different block within the main work. The movement within and between these scattered glass blocks will create the effect of ocean waves going beyond the display grid into the garden area.

San Francisco resident Jim Campbell received his BS in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from MIT in 1978 and has pursued careers in technology and art. His video and technology based art has won national recognition.

Hank Willis Thomas and Ryan Alexiev: The Truth Is I Am You

"The Truth is I Am You" is a poem installed as a series of speech balloons that line the covered walkway linking the School of Nursing and the School of Dentistry.

The 300-foot installation highlights the diversity of cultures that exemplify the UCSF community. Each balloon displays a single line from the poem translated into one of 24 languages spoken by the student body. Placards containing a phonetic spelling in English accompany them, so that any person can learn to say each line.

Starting with, "The truth is I am you" and ending with "The truth is I love you," this piece attempts to use this corridor as brief passageway to other systems of considering who we are, what we value, where we come from, and where we are going.

An inverted map of the world (with the North and South poles reversed) accompanies the poem, as well as a lenticular print of a man translating a line from the poem into sign language.

The languages include Amharic, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, and others.

The truth is . . .
The truth is I love you.
The truth is I know you.
The truth is I see you.
The truth is I hear you.
The truth is I fear you.
The truth is I feel you.
The truth is I adore you.
The truth is I respect you.
The truth is I follow you.
The truth is I judge you.
The truth is I choose you.
The truth is I remember you.
The truth is I remind you.
The truth is I frighten you.
The truth is I become you.
The truth is I believe you.
The truth is I resist you.
The truth is I am you.

Born and raised in New York, Hank Willis Thomas graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Photography and Africana Studies in 1998. He received an MFA in Photography and an MA in Visual Criticism in 2004 from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. His photographs have been published in numerous books and publications. Hank lives and works in New York and San Francisco.

Born in Bulgaria and raised in the Bay Area, Ryan Alexiev received a BA in History from University of California at Berkeley in 1994. He began practicing graphic design in 1995 and, since that time, has held senior art director positions at several companies such as Dazzle, eMuzed, and the Distributed Learning Workshop. He is also a practicing artist and has exhibited at galleries across the country.

Excerpted by permission from a text by Nancy Nye Jones, Synapse staff writer.

Photos: Sarah Paris