The UTD Mercury

Media Credit: Joe Chuang An orange-shaped seating area called the "Hot White Orange" is located outside Centraltrak.

A part of UTD's school of Arts and Humanities has opened its doors in Deep Ellum.

Called Centraltrak, the former post office-turned artist residence and gallery, is the building and program that provides UTD graduate students and professional artists room to live, work and display their work. The inaugural exhibition in Centraltrak's gallery is called "False Space and Time of the Apartment," a phrase taken from J.G. Ballard's experimental 1970 novel "Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A." It features several pieces that assistant professor of aesthetic studies and Centraltrak director Charissa Terranova, who curated the exhibit, calls "not quite art and not quite architecture, but somewhere in between."

Centraltrak is the second incarnation of UTD's artists' residency. The concept was first attempted in 2002 at the nearby South Side on Lamar lofts. Senior arts and humanities lecturer Greg Metz said the project closed in 2005 because of "complications with management."

Unlike the venture with South Side on Lamar, the residency's current location on Exposition Avenue is designed for a smaller number of residents and gives UTD full control of the gallery. Four of the eight rooms are designated for UTD graduate students and the rest for professional artists, one of whom must be an artist from Texas. The four student spots are highly competitive.

"It's free rent, after all," Metz said.

Most of the pieces in the exhibition had a peculiar journey to Centraltrak. While browsing her favorite bookshop in Antwerp, Belgium, Terranova said she stumbled upon a book of images of various artists' "architectural objects that create experimental space, the things I like. About 80 percent of this exhibition came from that compendium."

The exhibition includes an installation by a Dutch artist Daniel Rozenberg called "Checkpoint Dreamyourtopia." It presents a tabletop architectural model of a concrete compound, complete with barbed wire and figurines of guards. The mouth of an imposing pink skull forms the door to this structure. A laptop displays computer-generated video of a first-person view of the compound and the terrain surrounding it.

During his residency at Centraltrak Rozenberg will prepare a much larger model for Nevada's "Burning Man" festival.

Some visitors found their way into a large installation by another Centraltrak resident, German sculptor and installation artist Stefan Eberstadt. His "Loop" is an enclosed space with flat white sidewalls and a green floor and ceiling composed of a series of rectangular blocks.

Scores of guests of Centraltrak's April 17 launch shuffled between the indoor gallery and the space outside. An inflatable amphitheater called "Hot White Orange" from a San Francisco's architecture firm sat in the parking lot. Its nine seats looked like oversized orange peels; an end of each peel connected to a small stage in the middle. A collapsible disaster shelter called "Lifebean," for its bean pod shape, took up part of the loading dock.

Metz had the nontrivial task of installing the objects. "The pieces come in and they have to look a certain way and there needs to be a dialogue between them, but there's very limited space and many pieces," Metz said.

The exhibition runs through June 16 and is free of charge.

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