MFA Thesis Exhibition Catalog 2018

MASTER OF FINE ARTS THESIS EXHIBITION CATALOG | 2018

MASSACHUSETTS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN

MASTER OF FINE ARTS THESIS EXHIBITION CATALOG | 2018

MASSACHUSETTS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN

President: Dr. David P. Nelson Dean of Graduate Programs: Paul Paturzo Director of Curatorial Programs: Lisa Tung Design & Installation Photographs: Eduardo L Rivera (MFA ‘16) Installation Photographs by Artist: pp. 13, 26, 38, 39, 40, 41, 49, 55 Editor: Felicia Deneane (MFA ‘17) Cover: Soha Saghazadeh, Streets (from Redacted Plot Lines series) - Detail, 2018, 42x59.5, laser-printed photograph on redacted CIA documents ©2018 Massachusetts College of Art and Design MassArt.Edu/Grad

Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s Graduate Program has a long heritage of artistic excellence, exemplified by worldclass faculty and visiting artists. The urban campus along Boston’s Avenue of the Arts gives students access to over one million square feet of studio, classroom, living, and exhibition space. The opportunity to work and create in a diverse community of innovative artists, designers, and educators fosters a learning environment of multidisciplinary practice and collaboration - a central value of the Graduate Program at MassArt. MassArt also supports recent graduate alumni through funded local and international residencies, administrative internships, and exhibitions in order to assist members of our MFA community as they launch their careers.

For more information about our Graduate Program please contact Graduate Admissions at gradadmissions@massart.edu or (617) 879-7203.

We are proud to feature the work of the 2018 Master of Fine Arts graduates.

ARTIST ENTRIES

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BECKY BARSI

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BARBARA ISHIKURA

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BJ BECK

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MARIAH JOHNSON

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KELLY BURGESS

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MAHIMA KAPOOR

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ELIZABETH GILLIAN CARRÉ

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KELLY KNIGHT

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CHIAO TI CHUANG

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MADYHA LEGHARI

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NANCY C. diBENEDETTO

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DEVVRAT MISHRA

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MOLLY DRESSEL

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NAVIDREZA HAGHIGHI MOOD

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FARIMAH ESHRAGHI

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REBECCA MORRISON

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LIZZIE FALVEY

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SOHA SAGHAZADEH

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DEBORAH GRAY

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KEJING WANG

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QINRUI HUA

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EMILY YANG

BECKY BARSI MFA Low Residency | Lee, NH

is complemented by video projection and sound.

A secondary performance allows mother and daughter to, once again, reflect on these images, but now reconstruct the crumpled paper with care. Metaphors for both the spirit and the body, the images are worn and damaged, yet through this tender process of restoration, the images and performance present concepts of resilience and love. This work examines the phenomenological artificiality of the family portrait, and presents an experience of self-destruction, and later, reflection.

I aim to evoke feelings of inadequacy through the deconstruction of self-portraiture, and juxtapose these with feelings of love and acceptance.

Dysmorphia Looking into a mirror triggers feelings of imperfection and inadequacy. I cringe at the subtle bulge at my waistline, the thickness of my upper arm, and the curves that I try to hide behind highwaisted jeans and loose fitting tops. My mothers neurosi and corporate media’s narrow definition of beauty have weighed upon me since an early age.

My mind is torn between the rational and irrational: on the one hand - there is an understanding and confidence in my body as a woman, and on the other - an irrational internal force that keeps me from accepting and loving myself.

My thesis work draws upon the relationship between my mother and myself, and explores the intricacies and anxiety that accompany body dysmorphia and insecurity from parent to child. I present a collaborative performance with my mother and multimedia installation. Crumpled and tossed away, over time our distorted images oppress the light within the space, a metaphor for our spirit, hope and confidence. What remains of the performance

Dysmorphia (detail), 2017

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Dysmorphia, 2017, mixed media & performance

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BJ BECK MFA 2D | West Newbury, MA

I am a perceptual, representational painter drawn to themes of transition: physical, visual or emotional movement, “from here to there.” I work from direct observation and a variety of source materials, including my own response to the motif, the thing itself (an awareness psychiatrists call autognosis). Unlike the instantaneous capture of photography, the very act of painting travels through time, a fourth dimension. No matter the persistence of the observation, the observed is fluid, changeable, often uncontrollable and interactive. I strive, as a painter, to embrace the unexpected, the transient moments and surprises that have everything to do with my experience. My goal is to translate that experience into paint on a two-dimensional surface. I like to engage the viewer with a sense of “being there,” or a sense of curiosity or humor. I also like to leave a trace, something that suggests I was there.

Cellarway, 2017, oil on wood panel, 48”x 24”

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Sky’s the Limit, 2017, oil on wood, Studio Reflections, 2017, oil on canvas, Looking, 2018, oil on canvas, Longwood Reveal, 2017, oil on canvas

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KELLY BURGESS MFA Photography | Arlington, MA

as a way to catalogue and express the highs and lows of a heartbreak. As the project developed, I became aware of the almost ubiquitous nature of my feelings; how they were not unique and how songs on the radio could precisely capture my feelings or amplify them. I leaned into the irony of isolating and creating my own world while simultaneously going out on the road to search for fulďŹ llment.

The images in Sing Me Back Home were made on road trips across the United States between 20122018. I see the road trip both as an exploration of the external American landscape and as a way to explore an internal landscape through the use of text, image, and repeating themes. The work in Sing Me Back Home uses the road trip as a means of searching and the exploration of the cultural and social perception of loneliness. But by the act of searching and exploring, ultimately nothing is resolved.

I thought about my work within the context of the history of the American road trip: a coming of age journey that is almost entirely male, particularly within the history of photography and literature.

Where did I, a young woman making work about her internal landscape ďŹ t within this history?

The work straddles a line between sincere and ironic. I embarked on the project earnestly and

Sing Me Back Home, 2018, book

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Selections from Sing Me Back Home, 2018, archival pigment prints

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ELIZABETH GILLIAN CARRÉ MFA 3D | Connecticut

Shut Up and Listen compels the viewer to choose between passive or active roles of interaction in order to engage multiples sets of projected lips to sing in harmony. This piece evolved from a project that addressed my daily schedule, and became instead an interactive piece about my needs and wishes for cooperation and harmony.

During the 2016 election, I felt frustration as a bystander and I wished people to find peace through communication. As this project progressed I decided to use my face, lips and voice because I found myself unheard and unseen. I recalled a song from my time in chamber choir as a teenager called “Dona Nobis” which lyrics translates to “Give us Peace”. This song plays as a user engages with the installed space around them. This triggers one set of lips denoted by the color of lipstick to sing. This is a technique from design called Information Architecture. In this piece I also combine new technology with the old technique of plaster casting. I use plaster to make replicas of my face- which is often used to capture the likeness of the deceased. The decision to multiply my face and adjust physical features were

measures to remove myself from the narrative of a self portrait, and to insert my identity as a part of a collective. I use projection mapping to create a interactive space where the lips are engaged by the audiences movement in front of the plaster faces. Ultimately, I hope to elicit a visceral reaction to the physical space I created in this piece as a way to impact the viewer through the intangible presence of digital medias and the understood metaphor of traditional mediums.

Shut Up and Listen (detail)

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Shut Up and Listen installation (detail)

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CHIAO TI CHUANG MFA 2D | Taiwan

Trace, 2017, acrylic/wood panel/matt acrylic medium, 24“x 18”

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Trace installation (detail), 2018, acrylic

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NANCY C. diBENEDETTO MFA Low Residency | San Diego, CA

Installation (detail)

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Installation (detail)

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MOLLY DRESSEL MFA 3D | New Orleans, LA

Making sculpture activates my body. Through a physically intense process that is also meditative, I feel focused, purposeful. The bigger or more complex the structure, the greater my investment.

My sculptures are my strongest half. In that sense, the work extends my body.

My process of formation relies on the relationship between the material and myself, bonded by my weld. The way the material reacts to this relationship creates a dynamic space. This concept affects how the viewer navigates around the space that my sculpture inhabits.

Working with steel feels natural to me. I throw on my coveralls, lace my steel toes and walk into the metal shop feeling at home. I tighten the welding helmet, plug in the welder, attach the ground, and with the trigger of the welder in hand, I flip my helmet down and everything goes dark. I pull the trigger and suddenly I can see what I’m doing, what I’m connecting. I make my way down the line of the joint, moving my body with the same amount of ease one has while walking. I take comfort in this one-on-one process in which I can see nothing other than the puddling of the weld that I’m creating. I choose to weld. If done properly, a weld is strong and durable; it can be bent but not broken. It has a rhythmic line quality, a history of motion recorded in its solidity.

A weld signifies a bond between two planes and represents the hand that gives form to the inanimate.

I explore the boundaries of industrial materials in order to discover gestural and organic possibilities that the viewer can relate to. Tension, a delicate balance between stability and precariousness, is key to viewer experience in my work. The result is poised between movement and a powerful presence in space.

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Left: Keep Moving (detail), 2018, steel, MDF, 8’x12’x7”, Right: Falling, 2018, steel, bronze

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FARIMAH ESHRAGHI MFA Photography | Tehran, Iran

In choosing Farsi and English, I am using the languages I know to explore how visual and linguistic representation and translation can fail one another. These failures of language can have far-reaching consequences that includes many of the outcomes of colonialism as well as the oppression of the disempowered.

My work deals primarily with failures of text, language, and translation and how those are related to gender politics. The texts represented in my work are drawn from literature speciďŹ cally focused on female representation. Both texts and images are reproduced using the scanner as a camera. I treat these images as documents.

Witnesses to an erosion. In the past three few years, my work has been a research-practice investigating how the patriarchal system has shaped language as an oppressive force in the lives of women as in kept them largely invisible.

My research material includes folklore, fairy tales, literature, and spoken language.

Growing up using one language and now speaking another drove me to look at language as a subject and material for artistic practice. I started to investigate visual representations of language attrition and how each language starts to fail itself and the other at a certain point.

Babel (detail), 2018, archival inkjet print

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Babel installation, 2018, archival inkjet print

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LIZZIE FALVEY MFA Low Residency | Brookline, MA

“Optimism is the madness of insisting all is well when we are miserable.” – Voltaire The Psychopathology of Optimism is an experiential single channel video and two channel audio installation that provides a space for “disruptive contemplation.”

Housed in an 8 x 8 foot darkened cube, visitors enter the cube individually and are confronted with a series of questions intended to measure their levels of optimism. Because contemporary psychological research has found that increased optimism is associated with heightened frequency and potency of selfdeception, the isolation and unsettling visual and auditory experience inside the cube help visitors confront their own levels of optimism as a way to unmask—and therefore ultimately address—the sources of their malaise.

The Psychopathology of Optimism (detail)

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The Psychopathology of Optimism installation

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DEBORAH GRAY MFA Low Residency | Boxford, MA

Deborah Gray is a photographer who captures abstract landscapes with natural light. She explores the combination of time and movement to capture new interpretations of everyday spaces. Her recent photographic work is a study of interior portraits of light.

An exploration of alternative materials has led Deborah to work with acrylic, creating sculptures by manipulating form and texture. These acrylic pieces are used in conjunction with a light source to create experiences of illumination.

Lightform #82, 2017, digital photograph, 30"x20"

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Form for Light #4, Form for Light #1; 2017; acrylic, light, and shadow; Lightform #139, Lightform #82, Lightform #115; 2016-2017

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QINRUI HUA MFA Photography | China

Kick it out and Kill it, 2017, archival inkjet print, 34" x 45"

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Kick it out and Kill it installation

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BARBARA ISHIKURA MFA 2D | Taunton, MA

Mary Magdalene's Hair, 2018, mixed media on paper, 72" x 42"

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Left: Hail Mary, 2017, mixed media on paper, Right: Heavenly Procession, 2018, mixed media on paper

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MARIAH JOHNSON MFA 3D | Clifton Park, NY

Installation (detail)

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On the draining oscillation between anxiety and depression, 2017, journal entry, charcoal on wall

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MAHIMA KAPOOR MFA 2D | New Delhi, India

The discovery and the alchemy of found marks and experiences in my surroundings drive me to make artwork that is about the study of existence itself.

The history of marks and gestures drive my art making and studio practice. My surroundings and moments in nature that might be easily overlooked intrigue me and my approach is to bring awareness to this complex, subtle often unexpected nature of life and the richness of the visual world around us.

My paintings question the frame and its existence within the work. I am working in direct contact with physical spaces around me to push and transform my process of working. The image eventually becomes a record or an evidence of an activity that might have taken place in a particular site at a particular time. The mystery and the evidence of its residues left behind is perhaps the focus in my current studio practice. In many ways I consider my process as content and think that the experience of the work must no longer be separated from the experience of the gallery space that it is shown in.

Eva (detail) Paint on tracing paper and metal drawings

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Eva (detail) Paint on tracing paper and metal drawings

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KELLY KNIGHT MFA 3D | Providence, RI

of the maker. Existing garments are dissected and reconstructed in new forms, with new purpose, acknowledging that we are not irreversibly confined to a predetermined existence.

I use traditional materials and processes in nontraditional ways: weaving wire; using stitches as marks rather than purely functional elements; tearing seams out of clothing and altering the function of objects usually associated with female beauty (lipsticks, bobby pins, corsage pins). The resulting work observes social dynamics, and societal and self-imposed restrictions, and asks how we can work through and beyond them.

In popular American culture the beauty and fashion industries, social media and corporate culture fuel divisions among women. Competition and insecurity generate profits.

In my work, implements typically associated with women’s work and female beauty - needles, thread, fiber, scissors; beauty products and women’s fashion - serve as metaphor for the dynamics between women in contemporary society. Lipsticks can be transmitters that communicate and connect.

Needles are elements of both construction and of pain. Thread becomes the reliable spine of a garment, and the code that conveys the narrative

Holy Ordinary (detail), 2018

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Sister Transistor, 2018. Linen, cotton, paper, wire, steel, clothesline, lipsticks, common pins, ink, paint, graphite, thread

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MADYHA LEGHARI MFA Photography | Lahore, Pakistan

Left: The Impossible Describability of a Universe Without Language, 2018 Right: A Schematic Silence, 2018

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Left: The Index II, 2017, 99 images of found blank pages, inkjet prints Right: Siren, Stylus, Silence., 2018, nine channel video installation, 00:10:00

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DEVVRAT MISHRA MFA Film/Video | Lucknow, India

Number Two (still), 2018, HD video

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UntitledIndia’17, 2018, multi-media, installation (detail)

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NAVIDREZA HAGHIGHI MOOD MFA Photography | Mashad, Iran

This Place Looks Like a Paradise; This is Paradise When a father dies before his time, he remains for his son an eternal shadow, and an unstable memory that fades. The unresolved tension between remembering and forgetting keeps constant company with the present.

By the act of recalling, I can go to the most distant place to explore idiosyncratic forms of memory.

The subject is disappearance: its permanence and totality. I cannot find my father, aman who loved the ocean, a man who feared the ocean.

This Place Looks Like a Paradise; This is Paradise deals with traumatic experience of losing a parent and with the simultaneous reality that one never fully knows one’s parents. Just before my father’s death, he woke from a dream and spoke a few words to me, but I struggle to recall what he said. Since that time, I have been pre-occupied with imagining his last dream. I search through fragments of personal and family archives. I travel the roads we drove when I was young. I visit the places where he was photographed, strong and alive. A photograph can be a tool we use to take it back to the certain points in one’s life to remember the face, the place once understood and there is always something melancholic about a photograph with which by the act of layering images I reinforce that quality.

This Place Looks like a Paradise; This is Paradise, 2018 mixed media installation (detail)

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This Place Looks like a Paradise; This is Paradise, 2018, mixed media installation (detail)

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REBECCA MORRISON MFA Film/Video | Boston, MA

The multi-channel video and sound installation Twelve Players combines direct observation and performance as a means to explore the implications of digital technology on the body. Part theater and part anthropological study, the piece features twelve masked figures in monochrome uniforms, tethered to pedestals that move throughout the three walls of the space as the subjects engage in a series of virtual reality experiences.

The program oscillates between relative stillness and dance, chaos and moments of synchronicity. Viewers remain excluded from the disembodied space that the players inhabit, engaged instead in the act of spectating the spectator. Both banal and unsettling, this work examines themes of intimacy, alienation, voyeurism, disguise, and public vs. private space.

15 Players (still), 2018 Three-channel HD video projection, color, sound, 92”x 456”

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Twelve Players (installation view) 2018, Three channel video projection, HD, color, six channel audio, 12:00 min.

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SOHA SAGHAZADEH MFA Photography | Tehran, Iran

In 1953, the United States and the United Kingdom covertly operated a coup d’état, overthrowing the democratically elected prime minister who nationalized the Iranian oil industry which had been under British control. This history has been concealed from the public for decades. Many CIA records have allegedly disappeared or been destroyed. Several editions of declassified documents have been released but in every one of them, there are many redacted lines and missing pages.

How can one redraw these wiped out lines when the lines are marks of erasure? How is it possible to excavate the fragments of history when they are the concealing layers themselves? How do we connect the dots when every trace is misleading? Redacted Plot Lines is an attempt to imagine this erased history and to map it by employing archival materials, from photographs to newsreels, from newspapers to official documents. From discovery and exploitation of oil by British at the beginning of the twentieth century to the nationalization of the industry through democratic means and finally, the coup that brought the movement to an end.

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Three photographic maps, printed on redacted CIA pages, seek to track this history through layers of representation. At the bottom of each map, extracted sentences from newsreel voiceovers act as poetic map legends. The tone of these voice-overs is brought to light in a video projection.

Coupled with the newsreels outtakes, it questions the relationship between each unissued frame and their Western narrative. Projected on top of the latest declassified document, the hands that draw become the anonymous hands that cross the lines out. The sentences that were erased in declassified documents testify their existence in an interactive sound piece.

Triggered by the presence of the viewer, they whisper their redacted content.

These actio ns re sulte d in liter al re volt of th e pop ulati on,

Left: detail from Redacted Plot Lines series Right: Streets (from Redacted Plot Lines series), 2018, laser-printed photograph on redacted CIA documents

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KEIJING WANG MFA Photography | Quzhou, China

Interior Plant, 2017, inkjet print, 40“ x 30”

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Installation (detail)

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EMILY YANG MFA Photography | Shanghai, China

Blue Print, 2017, 24”x 30”, inkjet print

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Installation (detail)

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VIEW ADDITIONAL WORK FROM THESE ARTISTS

BECKY BARSI

www.beckybarsi.com

BJ BECK

www.limbicstudio.com

KELLY BURGESS

www.kelly-burgess.com

ELIZABETH GILLIAN CARRÉ CHIAO TI CHUANG

chiaoti-chuang.squarespace.com

NANCY C. diBENEDETTO

www.nancycdibenedetto.com

MOLLY DRESSEL

www.molly-dressel.com

FARIMAH ESHRAGHI

www.farimaheshraghi.com

LIZZIE FALVEY DEBORAH GRAY

www.deborahgraystudio.com

QINRUI HUA

www.qinruihua.com

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BARBARA ISHIKURA

www.barbaraishikura.com

MARIAH JOHNSON

www.mariahjohnson-art.com

MAHIMA KAPOOR

www.mahimakapoor.com

KELLY KNIGHT

www.kellyaknight.com

MADYHA LEGHARI

www.madyhaleghari.com

DEVVRAT MISHRA

www.devvratmishra.com

NAVIDREZA HAGHIGHI MOOD

www.navidhaghighi.com

REBECCA MORRISON

www.rebeccamorrisonphoto.com

SOHA SAGHAZADEH

www.soha-saghazadeh.com

KEIJING WANG

www.kejingwang.com

EMILY YANG

www.emily2ang.com

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MASSACHUSETTS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN