5 April – 26 May 2013

Opening reception: Friday, 5 April 2013, from 6 – 11 pm

Marginal Utility is proud to present LOREM IPSUM, an exhibition of new moving image works by the Southern California-based artist VICTORIA FU.

“Lorem ipsum” is a popular filler text to test fonts and graphic layouts–“neutral” words to not distract from the visuals. It signals emptiness to the contemporary viewer, yet it has a source meaning taken from Cicero: “Dolorem ipsum,” translated as “pain itself.”

Between a language of emptiness and a cinema of empathetic identification, Fu interrogates the eye–its perception of image-surface, where all things and nothing accumulates. Gathering cues from stock film footage and animated GIFs, Fu’s films are recombinant text, cut-and-paste narratives that reflect the mechanical processes of how they were made. The video installation of Lorem ipsum implies a haptic choreography of digital and filmic gestures. The 16-mm projection, Milk of the Eye, is a direct result of a shaping and also obscuring light of the visible image. In simultaneously digital and celluloid realms, the work dialogues between desktop interfaces, color field and filmic space.

Gallery 817 at the University of the Arts will host a parallel exhibition of Victoria Fu’s video work.

TIME IN THREE PARTS
5-19 April, 2013
Opening reception: Friday, 5 April 2013, 3-5pm

University of the Arts
Gallery 817, Anderson Hall
333 South Broad Street, 8th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Victoria Fu is a visual artist working with filmed, photographed and drawn images. She received her M.F.A. from CalArts, M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from USC, and B.A. from Stanford. Forthcoming shows include Approximately Infinite Universe at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and a solo at Flashpoint in Washington, D.C., in May, where in conjunction she will be speaking at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Previous exhibitions include: De Appel, Amsterdam; Zona MACO, Mexico City; Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York; Gallery Loop, Seoul, Korea; Museo de la Ciudad, Quito, Ecuador; UC Riverside/California Museum of Photography; Samsøn Projects, Boston; General Public, Berlin; among others. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post and the current “Cinematic” issue of ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art. Recipient of an Art Matters Grant, she was also a participant of the Whitney ISP in New York and artist-in-residence at Skowhegan. Fu lives and works in Southern California, where she is currently Assistant Professor of Art at the University of San Diego.

www.victoriafu.com
www.artoffice.org

This exhibition was made possible in part by a grant from the Mellon Research Initiative. Marginal Utility would like to thank Matt Suib from Greenhouse Media, Abby King, Erick Miller, C.J. Stahl, Zorawar Sidhu and Robert Chaney for their support of this exhibition.