DRAWING 2015
Drawing2015
The General Fine Arts Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art is pleased to present the 2015 Senior Thesis Commencement Exhibition. The interdisciplinary nature of the group has been nurtured and guided through out the sophomore, junior, and senior years to produce remarkable work. The GFA major exists specifically for students whose work bridges media and disciplines that include multiple departments. A tradition of new beginnings started with Intro to GFA course. The students refine their skills with an exploration of personal expression and ideas. The “Power Hour” is something to remember forever. Whatever medium you have chosen to pursue while you were at MICA will serve you well. I look forward to seeing what you will do with your talent and skills in the future. You possess all the tools you will need for meaningful expression within the social context in which you live and work. I know you are highly motivated to be the best you can be. The world is yours’ to conquer!
Rex R. Stevens Chair, GFA & Drawing departments
When we gathered in Falvey Hall on the first Monday of our weekly Senior Thesis meetings in late August of 2014, graduation seemed really far away. Subsequently, after being assigned a studio in the newly named Fred Lazarus IV Gradate Studio Center and meeting your core peer group, you ventured on a creative journey that led up to your fantastic commencement exhibition. “Visiting Artists at Noon”- our Monday Lecture Series included - Leonardo Benzant, Beverly Fishman, Barbara Friedman, Judy Glantzman, Sharon Horvath, Alex Kanevsky, Fabienne Lasserre, Eddie Martinez, Nick Pappas, Rene Trevino, Alexis Rockman and Beverly Semmes. Judy Glantzman was in residence for the year, serving as the Genevieve McMillan Reba Stewart Endowed Chair. Your final Thesis Defense and first semester Review Board provided intense, focused discussions of your artwork by a three-person faculty jury. You created professional quality artist statements, resumes, narrative biographies and business cards, and you attended numerous professional workshops. Some of you applied to graduate schools, internships, residencies, grants, galleries and prepared for life beyond MICA. Many of you participated in exhibitions on campus and in the greater community. Mainly you spent many hours in your studio developing your art.
This year’s Senior Thesis Core Faculty included Ellen Burchanel, David Cloutier, Marian Glebes, Fabienne Lasserre, Barry Nemett, Phyllis Plattner, Renee Rendine, Robert Salazar, Rex Stevens and Howie Lee Weiss. Seon Park a Mount Royal Graduate Student, was our Program Teaching Assistant. Various artists also visited your core groups at the invitation of your faculty, enabling you to meet and discuss your artwork with professionals in the field. What a year! I wish all seniors the best of luck for a rich and fulfilling artistic life.
Howie Lee Weiss Head of Senior Thesis GFA PTG DRW
Featured Artists
Lauren Anderson Behfar Bahadoran Chiosi Sydney Citrone Thomas Fabrizio Daisy Farrell Peter Favinger Goodwin Lydia Hall Emily Heineman Jack Kang Adrian Kuntze Reese Siedlecki Amanda Mae Sinclair
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Lauren Anderson laurenanderson.com
My drawings are an exploration of the portrait through both physical distortion and abstraction. In doing so, I explore how fixating on the details of a photograph can change how one perceives the image as a whole. By appropriating and altering specific family photographs, I examine interconnection and incompleteness, as well as the missed connections I have by not being a part of various familial memories. Throughout each image I concentrate on disrupting the natural progression of time through the distortion of various facial features. By distorting the portrait I also place an emphasis on using intricate smaller components in order to make a bigger image. By remixing the past, it allows me an opportunity to capture the moment.
→ Mom Linoleum Cut 11″×14″ 2014
→ Wedding → Graphite 24″×24″ 2015
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→ Weary Hercules Charcoal and PVA glue on paper 20″×32″
→ Exile Charcoal on paper 30″×42″
Behfar Bahadoran
Humanity is disconnected from nature due to the plurality and congestion of lingual concepts that has solidified around the beings in nature through human history. One has no connection to a tree, because before merely perceiving it, mentions it in one’s own mind by different qualities (color, texture, extent etc.) that language assigns to it. It is not surprising for human beings to lack the ability of being connected to the nature due to the gap that keeps our consciousness separated from the objective world. Humanity cannot be connected to the world in its actuality without the linguistic and conceptual interruption. The disconnection is inevitable. There is no liberating factor that can disassociate the world, as it exists in itself, from the congealed concepts, which we have assigned to it. The process in which I abstract the world around me does not accrue in my mind but it happens in the work of art. The process starts from the work itself and abstracts its form from within.
→ Social Fetish Graphite on paper pencil 7″×10″
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Chiosi cargocollective.com/chiosi
Communication through text has for me, always been a strenuous task in which my final efforts seem to continuously fall short of the intended mark. I am invested in the process of making, a form of converse that feels the most honest, because of this dilemma. My perspective comes from growing up in a mixed race household where “blending” or passing as an “all American” was deeply treasured. I gravitate towards commonplace materials and subjects as a means to evoke a sense of familiarity.
→ Burial Charcoal 2.5'×5.0'
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→ Maze Ink 2015
Sydney Citrone cargocollective.com/sydneycitrone
Things are created by the persistence of the past and influence of present surroundings. What measures the life cycle of a being? Its physical self? Its memory? I’ve been working with “Palimpsest” which means, “something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form” in order to explore the impact of forms against one another. → Sculpture Detail Graphite 2015
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→ Untitled (Detail) Chalk Pastel, Verithin Colored Pencil, Graphite 48″×60″
→ Spicy Grove, Weathered Tree, Lone Stars of Austerity Chalk Pastel, Colored Pencil, Graphite 24″×36″
Thomas Fabrizio cargocollective.com/thomasfabrizio
Through the use of dry mediums applied to paper, I draw the figure amongst objects of the natural environment such as fungus, water, foliage and fauna. The condensation of forms found through layers of color and value becomes the continuously experienced pattern present in the development and perception of these structures.
→ Dreamscapes Graphite, Conte Pencil 36″×84″
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Lugubrious Screenprint 11″×14″
Dissimulation MixMedia 24″×30″
Daisy Farrell daisyfarrell.com
→ My Dwelling Cutpaper 2'×1'
My work is never the same and is constantly changing, hence the discovery. Being an only child, I construct my own world and entertainment that grew to be solely unique to my own creative fingerprint. Pattern with alien and human form that hold physiological nuance using multimedia and unexpected materials. Life event, dialogue, and exploration unlock the many hidden things that must be reviled to further one's understanding of the self. I am a very tactile person, and since I was young I loved to build and craft various things. Heavily influenced by nature, urban life, people, the pattern and decoration movement, psych art, vintage design, and folk art.This mode of creation is something I must always have in my practice as an artist. I never want to be stuck to one medium or way of creating.
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→ Pride Graphite 6'×10'
Peter Favinger cargocollective.com/peterfavinger
My work stems from a love towards animals, both personal and distant, depending on how interested I am in the animal. Realism and expression is something I long have tried to recreate through drawing, and more importantly, capture the spirit and character of the animal within my artwork by creating a striking image. I convey my message through use of a limited color palette and specific composition that forces the viewer to key in on what I am communicating. By focusing solely on the subject in the large works and maintaining a blank environment, I am emphasizing what I believe is most critical and vital to the image. With my watercolors I achieve the same language but with color incorporated into the piece.
→ Portrait of Stella Graphite 6'×6'
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→ Fight Digital 15″×9″
Goodwin
→ Farther-Issues Digital 11″×8″
For my thesis I draw monsters or nonhumans in my work. My creatures are a combination of many different thoughts I have. Drawing creatures naturally come out in my work including the horrific themes. I am influenced mostly by videogames and the bondage and the submissive lifestyle, which can show in my work and inspires my ideas. I like scary things and the female anatomy. My goal is to paint in different styles and create different textures in traditional media, to help me learn more about traditional painting and colors, by using the textures I create that can add to my monsters looks. I also am challenging myself in designing the creatures by looking from life.
→ Troll-Werewolf-Hybrid Digital 37.5″×50″ 23
→ Clockwise starting top left: Indulge, Full Coverage, Waterman, Member of Society, Water to Dive In, Into the Industrial Video - Found Footage (color, sound) Credit: Archive.org
Lydia Hall cargocollective.com/lydiahall
The 50’s kickstarted the idea that products will modernize our lifestyle and therefore make us happy and successful, as a true American. The fact that mass production would somehow affect the future of the environment was not a regarded issue. It was more important to get their idea out onto the market and make profits rather than to consider how their materials would be reused or left in a trash heap, causing global environmental health issues. This thinking very much so is still present and as the products become more advanced, the more useful they become to us and the more materials are consumed.
→ Starting top to bottom: Raw Materials, Look, Divert, Change Your City Video - Found Footage (color, sound) Credit: Archive.org 2015
→ As We Choose Video - Found Footage (color, sound) Credit: Archive.org 2014 25
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Flora ink, watercolor 22″×7.5″
Fauna ink, watercolor 22″×7″
Emily Heineman cargocollective.com/emilyheineman
→ Neuro ink, watercolor 22″×15″
My work finds its roots in the interwoven strands of my cultural and artistic identities as well as my desire to fully control the viewer’s perception of the artist’s hand. I experiment by employing both traditionally eastern and western materials including graphite, ink, and paint into fluid, often-amorphous structures that allow for the individual attributes of the materials to intermingle. I then work back into the result, subtly highlighting particular points of interest, but treading a fine line in trying to keep a feeling of unintentionality. I then often integrate a more discernable image, usually pertaining to an ordinary subject within the natural world that lends itself to being portrayed on a 1:1 scale, lending the composition some immediacy. This allows me to draw on my more classical artistic roots and rectify my older love of precision and naturalism with my newer excitement over spontaneity and happy accidents, in itself, allowing me to also experiment with the limits of intentionality.
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Street Scene 1 Digital illustration 14″×18″
Room Scene 1 Digital illustration 14″×18″
Jack Kang
This body of work focuses on composing environments that serve as a tool for storytelling. As an artist, my field of interest is in comic books. In a comic book, the environment is an extremely important part of the story telling. To clarify the point, we can make an analogy to literature, for example, in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, the writer spends pages describing scenery. The point of doing this is to draw the viewer into an imaginary world that would otherwise be inaccessible. The story would not be told as powerfully if Tolkien had failed to do so. In a comic book, the comic artist does not need to write about the scenery, he can simply illustrate it. But the illustration must be done in a way that serves the same purpose. Simply rendering a realistic environment is not enough to do so. Instead, the comic artist must take into account every sensory experience one might have as he enters this environment. The light, the sound, the temperature... etc. must all be conveyed in the image. How this can be achieved is what I explore in my work. → Fox Scene 1 Digital illustration 14″×18″
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Adrian Kuntze
Inspired by African masks, I wanted to experiment with facial structures to create my own kind of masks, ones that are neither real faces nor traditional masks. Playing with the human face, I took organic shapes from those forms and added them to African masks. I stretched and manipulated the forms creating strange objects. I wanted to make them seem unreal. I started with the small pen drawings. They are my experimentations on morphing the angular forms of African masks and the soft organic forms of human facial structures. I then moved into linier graphite drawings, which were focusing on the same premise as the pen drawings but scaled up and given specific emotions. After the linier drawings, I worked on playing more with the organic forms of the human face. Using charcoal I pushed further with the idea of musculature and bone, creating masks that leaned less on the angular African masks and more on the organic shapes that come from human faces, but twisting them a little more.
→ Charcoal Mask 2 Charcoal 20″×26″
→ Charcoal Mask 1 → Charcoal 18″×20″
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Reese Siedlecki cargocollective.com/reesesiedlecki
My work is the transformation of an image across multiple mediums from drawing, painting, collage, and digital images. I’m interested in the reconfiguration of images through the use of layering, color, and light.
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My thesis, Translations, is about my process as much as it is my final images. I restructure photos, drawings and paintings into a collage, which I further digitally layer and manipulate. These images don’t exist physically until they’re printed out, at which point the digital images become artifacts that are related to but different from the original pieces that they are composed of.
Woven Light Digital Variable Size
→ Mirror Light → Digital Variable Size → Flicker Painting Digital Variable Size
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→ Sovereign Vespula Vulgaris Ink and Cut Paper 2'×1'
→ Serpentes Screenprint and Cut Paper 5'×4'
Amanda Mae Sinclair cargocollective.com/AmandaMaeSinclair
A lot of the inspiration for my work is drawn from horror vacui, nature, insects, anatomy, and science. The fact that insects take up approximately eighty percent of the world's species connects to the idea of horror vacui in the sense of covering Earth's surface. I view these pieces as my personal specimens investigating and manipulating the relationship between humans and insects. An important part of my process is playing with additive and subtractive sense of space using pen and ink, paint pens, and screen printing. I plan on pursuing a career in tattooing where I will be using the human body as a constant breathing,and moving gallery. Tattooing will also be another form of covering the body with pattern,and imagery that will display the relationship that I'm interested in.
→ Taxidermy Taste Screenprint 6'×4'
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Founded in 1826, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is the oldest continuously degree-granting college of art and design in the nation. The College enrolls more than 2,000 undergraduate, graduate, and continuing studies students from 46 states and 53 countries in fine arts, design, electronic media, art education, liberal arts and professional studies degree and non-credit programs. Redefining art and design education, MICA is pioneering interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving, research, and community and social engagement. Alumni and programming reach around the globe, even as MICA remains a cultural cornerstone in the Baltimore/ Washington region, hosting hundreds of exhibitions and events annually by students, faculty, and other established artists.
For more information on featured artists and programs of study please visit the General Fine Arts home page at: http://www.mica.edu/drawing
Drawing
Maryland Institute College of Art 1300 Mount Royal Ave. Baltimore, MD 21217 Office: 410-225-2260