Apprehensions of the Material World - SACI 2021 MFA Exhibition Catalog

SACI MFA EXHIBITION 2021

Apprehensions of the Material World

SACI 2021 MFA Exhibition Catalog

Lindsey Campbell - MFA in Photography Joe Cimino - MFA in Studio Art Eric J. Frey - MFA in Studio Art Bridget Hannah - MFA in Communication Design Arais Meteyard - MFA in Studio Art Melissa Morris - MFA in Studio Art Rudransh Nagi - MFA in Photography David Neal - MFA in Studio Art Victor Restrepo - MFA in Photography Marie-France Robichaud - MFA in Photography

April 2021

Studio Arts College International

Jules Maidoff Palazzo for the Visual Arts

Via Sant’Egidio 14, Florence, Italy

Lindsey Campbell - MFA in Photography

This work focuses on my relationship with my irritable bowel syndrome and the moments that happen because of it. Many people think that the only things that come from it are my painful symptoms, but there are also many moments in which I realize more than ever that I have strong and intimate connections with my loved ones, mainly my host mom Marta, my boyfriend Chris, my closest friends, and my parents.

Lindsey Campbell is a photographer from Atlanta, GA, currently in the MFA in Photography program at SACI. She mainly works in documentary photography with artistic work on the side. Her work involves getting to know people and their places, from the artisans of the Oltrarno to her friends and family back home.

All images from the series, In Light of IBS, 2020-21 (ongoing), Adobe Illustrator, print sizes vary

Joe Cimino - MFA in Studio Art

Joe Cimino is a time-based media artist, focusing primarily on video and sound. His work explores histories that remain overlooked in everyday life, highlighting what lies on the peripheries in order to safekeep their traces for an uncertain future. In his work, Cimino often breaks down the conventions of the formats he uses: a series of film trailers that never amount to a full movie, a sound work utilizing the podcast format to question its own existential narrative, large scale video installations of mundane objects that function more like paintings, and editing appropriated footage from western genre films to focus on the landscape rather than the main characters. In all of these works, Cimino brings the background to the foreground asking us to see beyond the banal and to reflect upon the hidden histories of what often goes unnoticed.

Joe Cimino is an Italian-American time-based media artist, musician, producer, and podcaster living and working between New Jersey and Florence, Italy. Growing up traveling back and forth from the United States to Italy, he holds on to his dual cultural identity, which is present in his artistic practice. He holds a BFA in Studio Art from Rowan University and is currently in the middle of his MFA in Studio Art at Studio Arts College International, located in Florence, Italy.

www.joeciminoart.com

Eric J. Frey - MFA in Studio Art

Embrace the Red Tape. In the digital age where memory has been converted into bits and bytes, Eric Frey recaptures the essence of memory retention and transmission before the digital age. Utilizing the bureaucratic aesthetic and the practices of governmental institutions, he created a new institution to preserve and protect memories. Having built the International Mnemonic Object Registration Administration as an umbrella organization, the Administration’s Ministry of Mnemosyne collects memories that have been imprinted on mnemonic objects by humans and non-humans through this ongoing participatory art project. Incorporating verbal, written, visual, and haptic memories that are imprinted within banal objects, the Ministry of Mnemosyne’s Memory Registration Commission methodically transforms these ephemeral mementos into precious artifacts that are authenticated and preserved within the Archive of Memories.

Eric J. Frey (b. 1974) was born in Visalia, California, and his interdisciplinary arts practice is currently based in Dallas, Oregon. A combat veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, he retired from active duty in the Oregon Army National Guard as a Master Sergeant. He received his BFA in Art & Design from Western Oregon University in Monmouth, Oregon, in 2019, and his MFA in Studio Arts from Studio Arts College International in Florence, Italy, in 2021.

www.freykunst.com

Bridget Hannah - MFA in Communication Design

How do we organize and interpret space? Understanding how space becomes place by focusing on behavioral, multi-sensory mapping avoids the paradigmatic rigidity seen in traditional, cognitively designed maps and navigational systems. The motivation for this thesis is to explore alternative methods of spatial communication and examine possible applications across various disciplines. Using a creative method of depicting familiarity with the physical world by employing tactile expression with clay or “blob mapping” proved to be an insightful tool. Additional efforts exploring the possibility of future considerations included transforming clay responses to augmented reality “blobs.” The observations made from “blob mapping” extend to a better understanding of how we navigate and orient individually and the implications of social interaction with spatial decision making and behavior.

Bridget Hannah approaches her work with an appreciation of the vitality of human-centered design. Understanding design as a communication tool, she explores function and encourages interaction through creative conceptualization. Within her unique design process and approach, she integrates an academic background in psychology and firsthand consumer behavior experience gained during her position as a flight attendant. Her work employs this multidisciplinary foundation, concentrating on interactivity between people and design.

www.bridgethannahcreative.com www.blobmaps.com

Arais Meteyard - MFA in Studio Art

Arais Meteyard works within the embodiment of nonsensical thought to show multiple perspectives in the disruption and manipulation of narratives. She presents her own narratives as non-descriptive polysemic forms to focus on the poetics of ambiguity. Employing strategies that incorporate playfulness, chance, imagination, and abstraction, her research suggests the potential for narratives to remain outside of logic and labels, revealing a multitude of ideas towards an awareness of self in the world to create a suspended place in a suspended time.

Raised in a family of the arts, Arais Meteyard’s environment comprised the works of her grandfather Ralph Eugene Meatyard, poems by her mother, master printing practices of her father, children’s illustrations of her uncle, and the paintings of an unfamiliar relative who succeeded in London. She left home to study the ancient art of the Maya in the Yucatan Peninsula, the modern to generational practices twice in Tokyo and Kochi Japan, and now the historically prominent world of Florence, Italy.

Melissa Morris - MFA in Studio Art

Drawing on ideas from critical posthumanism, Melissa Morris works with shifts in perspective to re-think the notion of the human and our place in the order of things. In painting, drawing, and interventions on found images, she uses the grid as a structure and metaphor to address our systems of ordering and knowledgeconstruction, and wonders about the consequences of using the grid to build and make sense of the world. By bending or twisting the grid, what happens to our system of measure—with the human eye/I at the center—and what might replace it? Her work draws on models of self-organizing systems in nature and looks to art for its collaborative nature of building knowledge across a spectrum of time and space and beyond the human.

Melissa Morris uses the language of painting and drawing to address our ways of making sense of the world, looking to self-organizing systems in nature for the use of line and considering color a form of thinking. She received her BA from the University of Michigan, is an MFA candidate at SACI (Florence, Italy), and takes part in ongoing international artists residencies with the artist duo rosenclaire. Her work has been shown internationally and is held in private collections.

www.soundingitout.com

Rudransh Nagi - MFA in Photography

As symptoms of an anxiety disorder are not visible, it is difficult for people to understand its seriousness. This project shows that mental health is not the only thing affected, but that it snowballs into physical, emotional, sentimental, and social life. These underlying effects are not evident to a person who does not have an anxiety disorder and are devalued when people say that everybody goes through anxiety at some point.

Having the same reaction to your friend saying hello and being chased by a bear trying to kill you is what separates it from regular anxiety. This hypersensitive stage, most of the time, is turned on for many varied reasons. This series shows the deterioration of a person’s life using home degradation, mostly hidden from others.

Rudransh Nagi was born in New Delhi in 1990 and is currently based in Italy. After attaining political science and sociological degrees, he went to Paris, where he studied photography at Spéos. His goal is to use the photographic documentary language to witness and create a record of sociologically and anthropologically relevant situations. He is also interested in conceptual/diaristic uses of photography as a way to represent his own psychological life. His current works entail all the genres mentioned above.

www.rudranshnagi.com

David Neal - MFA in Studio Art

David Neal’s work addresses inequality, surveillance, and control using video, photography, performance, and installation in order to critique institutional power. Institutions play an important role in society to assist communities by administering facilities and programs that promote learning. Artists and thinkers are taking actions to decolonize institutions and have shed light on the drawbacks. Neal is interested in how institutional powers give access and control to a person’s visibility and identity. Who has access and who does not? Are the pathways to access equal? The U.S. education system still follows outdated standardized learning systems and teaching practices that are not equitable to students with learning disabilities or BIPOC students. In his work, Neal addresses these issues, raising questions as to how we might break from these outdated systems.

David Neal is an adopted Peruvian- American interdisciplinary artist currently residing in Florence, Italy. Neal’s work, rooted in his own experience, addresses inequality, surveillance, and control to critique institutional power. He received his BFA in Studio Arts from Beacon College in Leesburg, Florida, and is an MFA candidate at Studio Arts College International in Florence, Italy.

Victor Restrepo - MFA in Photography

Un Viaggio

When talking about my fears, almost two years ago, I said that the main fear was that my ideas would escape from my head on the operating table. The person I was talking to replied that others, perhaps, would come in.

Now, others looking at my images notice how precarious and unfinished the framed places and details look. Maybe because I still feel unfinished, “non finito.”

Born in Bogotá 26 years ago, Victor has always been in love with photography and obsessed with the desire to force a certain indexical rigidity into it, convinced that it can also be sculpture, performance, and more. Having disappeared on an operating table in 2019—reborn a second time shortly after—he now tells, physically in Colombia and dreamily in Italy, the story of his recovery and self-discovery.

This is not so much the journey, but a particular journey—one I started in the summer a year ago, in Florence, and that I am continuing now, in Bogotá. It is a journey of recovery and rediscovery, of what I thought I had lost and of my own vision.

Marie-France Robichaud - MFA in Photography

Memories in Erosions is an artistic research of our relationship with time—more specifically, on how memory loss can be represented in different ways by using the geographic concept of erosion. The ideas developed are rooted in stories or experiences from the past but are used to explain the present.

Using the snowball effect, the starting point for the projects is Gabrielle, the author’s paternal grandmother. It was the curiosity for the degradation of her memory, evaporating and disappearing, that influenced the final images, which derive from landscapes, archives of the paternal and maternal family, self-portraits, written stories, and personal journals.

Born in Canada, Marie-France Robichaud lives in New Brunswick, where she received a BA in Visual Arts from the Université de Moncton. After receiving the S.H. Mackay Merit Scholarship, she took courses in photography, which then became her primary artistic interest. The main theme of her artistic research is our relationship to time, expressed in narrative visual form. She then undertook a master’s degree in photography at Studio Arts College International in Florence (Italy), for which she received an internal scholarship and the ARTSNB Scholarship for Arts Studies as well as the Baxter & Alma Ricard Graduate Scholarship.

EXHIBITION This catalog (a box set of 10 individual booklets) is published in conjunction with the exhibition Apprehensions of the Material World, held in the exhibition spaces of SACI’s Jules Maidoff Palazzo for the Visual Arts, in via Sant’Egidio 14, Florence, Italy, from April 15-25, 2021. This catalog features the final projects and critical texts of graduating students in the MFA in Studio Art, MFA in Photography, and MFA in Communication Design programs at Studio Arts College International (SACI) in Florence, Italy.

TEXTS BY Dejan Atanackovic, Steven Brittan, Lorenzo Bruni, Alessandra Capodacqua, Valeria D’Ambrosio, Romeo Di Loreto, Daria Filardo, Martin Foessleitner, Valeria Mancinelli, Emily Reilly, Jacopo Santini, Kirsten Stromberg, Camilla Torna

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Daria Filardo, Pietro Gaglianò, Regan Wheat

GRAPHIC DESIGN / COVER DESIGNS Naomi Muirhead / Bridget Hannah

PHOTO CREDITS Jacopo Santini, Mary Rezny (for Arais Meteyard), and the artists

COPY EDITING Christina Gednalske

PRINTED BY Litografia I.P. - Florence, Italy

ISBN (complete box set of 10 individual booklets) 9788885495081

Studio Arts College International Palazzo dei Cartelloni Via Sant’Antonino, 11 50123 Florence, Italy info@saci-florence.edu www.saci-florence.edu

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