The graduating class of MFA in Visual Arts candidates collectively agreed upon the exhibition title it feels familiar, as it suggests a number of themes that are present throughout this catalog. For sure, many of the works examine memory, often as fractured and unreliable yet full of potential to create more hopeful futures. Below are four other intersecting themes (in bold) through which to explore their diverse artworks, details of which are on the following pages. The works of Anna Goraczko and Michael Alexander Fernandez explore the borders between the material/spiritual worlds. Goraczko uses light as a medium through which the objects she has brought together—proxies for her grandmother—assume a metaphysical dimension. Fernandez’s altar-like tableau evokes the phenomenological, effectively blurring subjects and objects as discrete entities. Issues of domesticity and belonging can be found in the works of Donelric Owens and Alex Del Canto. Owens’ photographs and prints depict the subcultural cosplayer community, specifically its darker-skinned members. Del Canto’s poignant video work is based on her immigrant family’s trove of super 8 film from the 1960s to the 1980s.
A few works focus on the porosity of forms/frames. Devora Perez’s work plays with the mutable line between painting and sculpture as historical constructs, whereas Dominique Sandoval’s practice mobilizes the line and circle to evoke the uncanny overlaps between the micro and macro, the cellular and celestial. Yi Chin Hsieh’s work questions the exhibition itself, as a form—testing its borders and elasticity as a medium of display. Archives, found or fictional, is a trope used among this group. Chris Friday creates an archive
of objects meant to stand-in for the lived experiences of people of color she encounters on social media among other places. Carrington Ware mines found film footage of the rural and black South from the 1960s to the 1980s to stitch together and approximate her own family history, which remains unrecorded. Finally, given that many works could be easily part of more than one of these themes, what I have outlined is only meant to be a loose guide through which to frame your experience of looking through this catalog. Indeed, inevitably you will find other concepts connecting the works—effectively constructing your own exhibitions within the formal exhibition.
Alpesh Kantilal Patel Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory and MFA director during part of the tenure of this brilliant group of artists
Alex Del Canto
How’s the end is a multimedia installation made up of audio and video work taking place in a constructed domestic setting. The video imagery is sourced from color super 8 films collected from Del Canto’s family archive. The audio components are recorded conversations, musical performances, and fabricated sounds. The materials relate to the themes of home, family, memory, and deterioration.
How’s the end 2020 Video still (detail)
Michael Alexander Fernandez
Using Neo-Pagan, Catholic, and Santero sensibilities, Fernandez creates altar-like installations to work through personal narratives that deal with love, loss, mental illness, and emotional turmoil. His installations use spiritual, religious, and ceremonial presentations in a form of curative performance, building sacred spaces to repair, recuperate, and reconstruct a hopeful outcome. “You think you have lost your faith but you have not, you have only misplaced your faith. And you can find it, where it lies now deep in your soul, and the way to do that is through the simple process of love.” From the short video, The Odyssey: Chapter 8, Delilah by Florence Welch
...and for a moment we were able to be still 2020 Mixed media installation (detail)
Chris Friday
Often employing the use of a “blackboard” aesthetic, Friday investigates themes of identity, race, gender, sexuality, and the effects of popular culture on the perceptions of brown bodies. She focuses on dominant and often problematic perspectives and their origins, questioning their legitimacy and offering possible solutions. Distilling esoteric iconography from the lived experiences of people of color, Friday explores language ritual, identity, and black culture, through a lens of desire and longing. The purposefully clumsy, handbuilt quality of the objects in the Supplement Archive and the fragile nature of the ceramic medium itself, reflects the artist’s attempts to investigate the use of a semi-essentialist approach to black identity, while rejecting indestructible, fixed constructs.
Supplement Archive 2020 Mixed media installation (detail)
Anna Goraczko
In her work, Goraczko seeks to connect to her genealogy by creating installations that provide a feeling of familiarity and safety, as well as serve as tributes to the bonds made in these remembered spaces. The pain of mourning the loss of her grandmother Linda, subtly transforms into a consciousness of her grandmother’s spiritual presence. In this work, Goraczko meditates on how her grandmother’s spirit permeates her memory and physically engages with the objects that they once shared in space and time. Goraczko constructs an environment that mimics Linda’s living room where she spent many summers. Goraczko combines her materials with elements from her grandmother’s archive to create an interplay between the two, comingling across various sites and moments in time to connect with her.
Royal Country 2020 Installation (detail)
Yi Chin Hsieh
The Gift Shop explores and challenges the parameters of exhibitions. It also functions as an experiment in using curatorial practice as a medium in artmaking. Collecting and re-creating materials and objects related to the practice of the eight artists who are participating in the MFA show, The Gift Shop questions and reimagines the context of an exhibition. The project serves as both a literal, functioning shop and as an “exhibition within an exhibition.�
The Gift Shop 2020 Mixed media (detail)
Devora Perez
Perez blurs the boundaries among painting, sculpture, architecture, and design to construct elaborate reliefs that incorporate a wide range of materials. In the Interior Landscape series, Perez refers to painting and/or use it as a point of departure through systemic and overlapping investigations of support, auxiliary support, paint, and the wall. These works similarly raise questions about the relationship among object and viewer and the built environment. In her work, Perez also address broader social concerns, such as the exploration of gender roles. For instance, she employs techniques and materials conventionally associated with domesticity (such as trivets, wallpaper, decorative pebbles, lace, and fabrics) to create geometric abstract forms, providing a counter narrative to the traditionally male-dominated field of minimalism.
Split Consciousness 2020 Plexiglass, asphalt, and wood (detail)
Dominique Sandoval
Sandoval’s work focuses on exploring the cell, its “imperfect perfections” and “organized chaos.” Of particular interest is the cell’s ability to mutate, evolve, and adapt—processes that are mirrored in her experimentation with printmaking and through the interventions she makes in her works on paper through cutting and sewing. Sandoval explores her interest in nature through color, lines, shapes, and texture, implicitly commenting on the human/nature false dichotomy which characterizes the Anthropocene.
Growth 2020 Mixed media (detail)
Donelric Owens
Owens’s works examine the cosplay (short for “costume play”) community, comprised of a spirited group of individuals who unabashedly wear costumes of their favorite characters from anime movies, videogames, and popular culture. In particular, through photography and printmaking, he focuses on the less well-known African-American contingent of this subculture, embracing them while also bringing attention to their marginalization—and implicit racism—within the largely white cosplay community.
Black Cosplayers: No Meddlin’ with My Melanin 2020 Archival inkjet print
Carrington Ware
In Reimagined Memories, a found footage video, Ware evokes memories of her parents’ childhood. The anonymous people in the video are meant to reenact moments her parents shared through their oral storytelling. Through exploration and appropriation, familial ties are connected to create collective moments of black life in the rural South.
Reimagined Memories 2020 Appropriated video still (detail)
Alex Del Canto Michael Alexander Fernandez Chris Friday Anna Goraczko Yi Chin Hsieh Devora Perez Dominque Sandoval Donelric Owens Carrington Ware