The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego announces the artists participating in the upcoming exhibition, Here Not There: San Diego Art Now, which focuses on the range of individual and collective contemporary art practices in the San Diego region. Opening June 6th, the exhibition will be on view through September 19, 2010 at MCASD La Jolla.

Here Not There will offer a stimulating and provocative view into the variety, strength, and vitality of work being produced by contemporary artists living in San Diego County. The exhibition will focus on emerging artists—serving as the first museum exhibition for many—as well as under-recognized mid-career artists, and will include artworks in a wide range of genres, from painting, drawing, and sculpture to installation, video, new media, conceptual and performance art.

San Diego’s visual arts have developed a critical mass of local talent, including Dave Adey, Kelsey Brookes, and Andy Ralph, remarkable for their commitment to creating practices—studio-based, public, or collaborative—that explore unorthodox, often solitary, forms of production while experimenting with innovative structures for the dissemination of art. Here Not There does not aim to reach definitive conclusions about the nature of artistic production in San Diego County, nor draw a single narrative illustrating notions of identity or regionalism. The main objective is to chart as straight a trajectory as possible: from the artist’s studio to the exhibition space. From this investigation, the exhibition emerges as a site of multiple overlapping thematic lines, encircling around disparate communities with their own gravitational centers, each defining a “here” that nearly touches another.

In the past 25 years, MCASD has organized six survey exhibitions of San Diego artists—notable among them are A San Diego Exhibition: Forty-Two Emerging Artists (1985), which surveyed visual arts, as well as theater, performance art, and fashion design; and Off Broadway: New Art from Downtown San Diego (2000). San Diego artists have participated in numerous group exhibitions organized by MCASD, including the international group exhibitions Weighing and Wanting: Selections from the Collection (2008); Soundwaves: The Art of Sampling (2007); and From Baja to Vancouver (2004).

Come out Saturday, June 5th for the opening reception.  Free to MCASD Members, and $10 for guests.