Universal Dissolvent: Fragments from the Southern California Megalopolis

Curated by SDAI Curator-in-Residence Alex Young, Universal Dissolvent is an exhibition and in-progress archive showcasing artists whose work confronts the challenges of the Southern California megalopolis and address the spatial, historical, and social conditions of the region and its geopolitical 'centers': Los Angeles and San Diego/Tijuana.

The individuals, collaboratives, and collectives within employ multiple disciplines and critical approaches toward a diverse set of concerns into the past, present, and future shaping of the urban totality of Southern California. The exhibition is comprised of projects spanning over 20 years, including new and rarely seen works, providing insight into a breadth of critical regional practice from recent history.

Examining the urban geography of Southern California–its environment, its political and spatial organization, and its position within broader collective consciousness–the exhibition seeks to probe the specificity of the region, its reputed exceptionalism, and its argued place as the paradigmatic American metropolis for the 20th and 21st centuries. The apparent product of an impossible practice–like alchemy or utopia–Southern California, through the intervention of waves of enterprising inhabitants (boosters, engineers, real estate schemers, and dreamers of edenic abundance), has in the course of little over a century transformed from a semi-arid desert environment and a few sun-blasted frontier towns into the home of the world's largest bi-national conurbation, the nation's second largest city, the continent's fourth largest megapolitan population, its busiest shipping port, and a dominant global force within everything from popular culture and consumer products to engineering, urban planning, and intellectual discourse.

The exhibition's title, Universal Dissolvent, refers to the mythic substance of the same name once sought by alchemists as the elixir of life, a facilitating agent of transformation, and moreover a substance to dissolve all substances. Vernacularly, it denotes something much simpler, more tangible, appreciably vitalizing, namely: water. Invoking the conquest of the arid American southwest and the extension of mass habitability to the spoils of Manifest Destiny through grandiose feats of engineering in irrigation and infrastructure; Universal Dissolvent attempts to address the challenges of the region's growth and asks: What is to be made of Southern California? Further, how can we address Southern California's dissolutions: of the natural environment, of the city, of the public, of distance, and of the universals of imperial modernism and global post-modernism? Universal Dissolvent looks to situated practice and critical regionalisms to question the possibilities of sustainable, specific, local, civic, cultural, renewable, edaphic, geologic, and geographic within a region synonymous with the anti-urban, ecological disaster, militarized space, simulacral eden, boosterism, economic collapse, and longstanding wars on labor, poverty, and immigration.

Artists in the exhibition include: Monica Arreola, Natalie Bookchin, Louis Hock, Janet Koenig & Gregory Sholette, Los Angeles Poverty Department, Charles G. Miller, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colonia Libertad, Owen Mundy, Gabriela Torres Olivares & Omar Pimienta, Bob Paris, The Periscope Project, Nils Schirrmacher, and SPURSE.

san diego art institute

1439 el prado
san diego, CA 92101


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Sunday 12 noon to 4pm
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“UNIVERSAL DISSOLVENT” will run March 6 until April 10, 2015, with an opening reception on March 13, 6:00-8:00pm at SDAI.