SAN DIEGO – The contemporary art exhibit, “Beyond the Age of Reason,” curated by Larry and Debby Kline, is nearing the end of its run at the San Diego Art Institute in Balboa Park. If you want to be intrigued, or even possibly enraged, by various artists’ visions of religion and spirituality, you’ll need to get to the museum space before the exhibit closes on October 31st.
The myth-master is Eleanor Antin, one of the founding members of UC San Diego’s Visual Arts Department, and an internationally-admired artist, or as the Klines put it: “an artist of the world.” Shown here is one of the pieces from her “Roman Allegories,” a series of large-scale photos staged in Del Mar and La Jolla that re-envision the last days of an ancient civilization remarkably similar to ours.
After the failed military coup of 2016 in Turkey, Iristay designed 55 rehals (the x-shaped bookrests for the Quran) and filled them with small minarets. Titled “Oku | Read,” the rehals are covered with military cards used by soldiers to keep track of their service days. The translucent cast-resin minarets are in jumbled disarray. The piece, part of the San Diego Art Institute’s exhibition “Beyond the Age of Reason,” warns of ignorance.
“Myth is open to interpretation, and unfortunately, so are truths, but they are still the underpinnings of religious belief. The nuances of belief can either unite or divide individual, families and nations. The nuances can lead to peace or more often, war,” the Klines relate. “We believe -pun intended – that the artists reflect the larger populace that struggles with the concept of belief.”
Although this article was not specifically written about “Beyond the Age of Reason,” Smithsonian’s feature article on Wayne Martin Belger and his “Us and Them” project was published just days before our exhibition opened. Since the “Beyond the Age of Reason,” exhibition is the first time that “Us and Them” has been publicly exhibited, we felt it important to include the article here. To read the complete story, please visit SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, “The Dispossessed,” by Anna Diamond, July 2018.
San Diego Art Institute in Balboa Park Presents: Beyond the Age of Reason
Dates: September 1–October 31, 2018
Member Reception: Saturday, September 15 from 5pm-6pm
Public Reception: Saturday, September 15 from 6pm-8pm
The museum is open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 10am-5pm, Wednesday 10am-8pm,
Saturday-Sunday 12pm-5pm
We understand Larry and Debby Kline stepped in when a curator dropped out for the Reuse Recreate Reimagine and they did a stunning job of pulling together an exciting group of artists in this museum level exhibition.
Curator of the 3Rs exhibition is Debby Kline — half of a dynamic art duo with her husband, Larry — who was called in to organize the show at the 11th hour, when the previous curator suddenly departed. No stranger to the museum, Debby had worked there in the mid-1990s, even doing a stint as Interim Director. Besides working on the new Alchemist installation and teaching art at Design Institute and UCSD Medical School, Debby managed to step into the curator’s role and assemble an eye-popping show in record time.
Potentially irreverent and provocative but definitely something to see! Now on exhibit in the center’s Gotthelf Gallery is Seeing is Believing: A Reinvention of Articles of Faith that was curated by the diabolically clever artist husband and wife team Debby and Larry Kline. Spending two-years curating the exhibition, it is a mix of artists and artworks that explore various aspects of religion: from its capitalist complications and implications to its dogmatic altruisms and idiosyncrasies.
Talk about eclectic: Imagine an art exhibit that includes an elegant neo-Gothic cathedral made out of metal crutches, Vatican-approved marble reproductions of the heads of Michelangelo’s famous Pieta figures, fragments of Bible pages turned into Rorschachs, a 3-D “Mother of all Buddhas,” and a penny-filled cross that tells the future (sort of) to anyone who drops in a coin. It’s “Seeing is Believing: A Reinvention of Articles of Faith,” on view at the Lawrence Family JCC’s Gotthelf Gallery. Curated by Debby and Larry Kline, prizewinning artist-provocateurs who love to turn convention upside-down and get people talking.
Curators Larry and Debby Kline have pulled together a multi-religious, multi-media exhibition in which religious symbols are conflated with symbols from other human arenas to produce an exhibition which may inspire some, anger others, but get everyone to think.
Seeing is Believing: A Reinvention of Articles of Faith
FEATURING THE WORK OF: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Einar and Jamex De La Torre, Dave Ghilarducci, Paula Levine, Cheryl Nickel
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