Penombra - SACI MFA Exhibition Catalog

PENOMBRA 19-23 April 2018 Jay Dexter Victoria Jane Elizabeth Hodge Lindsey K. Johnson Cocoa Laney Jane Mason Maria Khalid Nissan Margareta Skรถld

Galleria Il Ponte via di Mezzo, 42/b, Florence, Italy info@galleriailponte.com

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THERE IS NO THERE THERE 17-30 April 2018 Alexandra Wong

Caffè Letterario Le Murate Piazza delle Murate, Florence, Italy caffeletterario@lemurate.it

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Foreword / Introductions

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Foreword Steven Brittan, SACI President

It is with nostalgia that we say farewell to this extraordinary group of student artists graduating from the MFA in Studio Art, MFA in Photography, and MFA in Communication Design programs. As they focused intently on their growth and development at SACI, they simultaneously formed a close-knit community, one in which they could share their work with each other and embrace new ideas. At SACI’s Jules Maidoff Palazzo for the Visual Arts, we hosted Open Studios events for the public, as well as solo shows where our students had the opportunity to exhibit their work, experiment and learn how to present their art, build their personal identities, and prepare for future careers as artists. In these two intensive years, we have seen their work improve exponentially.

It was also evident how much our faculty enjoyed imparting their knowledge and experience on these emerging artists, and how they delighted in seeing them excel. In this catalog, our faculty have so eloquently described their appreciation for their students, including the choice they made for the theme for the final show Penombra. We hope you will share in our excitement for their work on view at Galleria Il Ponte and Caffè Letterario Le Murate.

From all of us at SACI, we congratulate our students on their wonderful achievements and wish them continued success.

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Managing Light Filipe Rocha da Silva, MFA in Studio Art Program Director

Penombra is the title chosen by the graduating artists for this catalogue, as well as the SACI MFA in Studio Art and MFA in Photography exhibition at Galleria Il Ponte. Very similar to the English and Portuguese word penumbra, this Italian word derives from Latin paene (almost) umbra (-shadow). At first glance, it seems inappropriate as a title for the final effort of the MFA graduates. Common sense would lead one to believe that a pure and bright light should be cast on this group of artists, who are finally ready for action. Why would they want to stay in the penombra? Isn’t it a rather gloomy and depressing idea?

Well, all of us have learned during the last two years that reality is not purely in black and white, meaning that the intermediate shades also count. Some of us were taught from childhood that being in the light is much better than being in darkness, but the pursuit of art frees us from this somewhat preconceived and naïve idea, and we realize that both are equally specific moments in chiaroscuro.

Maria Zambrano, a great 20th-century Spanish philosopher, praised penumbra. She said that even the great sun finds its own freedom only among the shadows, in the penumbra. She also mentioned that painting is the most human of all arts, because it exists in a different time, between penumbra and revealing light. Though painting was born in the cave, it derives from light, which puts it close to the intangible, the dwelling of the mysterious. She was thinking, of course, about the allegory of the cave, the penumbra where Plato saw life as a series of fleeting reproductions of ideas.

We associate penu(o)mbra, among many others, with Leonardo da Vinci, Johan Heirich Füssli, Caravaggio, Tiziano, Tintoretto, Artemisia Gentileschi, Vermeer, Rembrandt , Georges de La Tour, Zurbaran, Josefa de Óbidos, William Blake, Edward Hopper, Vija Celmins, Kara Walker, William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, and Gerhard Richter.

Something else I like about the etymological origin of the chosen title is the “almost” element. In between the Shakespearean to be and not to be, almost is a transitory, hybrid, and ethereal condition, which very much speaks to life today.

Avoiding absolute darkness and blinding illumination, artists learn to navigate in the penumbra as a method that enables them to reach as far as possible.

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The Invisible Through the Visible Romeo Di Loreto, MFA in Photography Program Co-Director Jacopo Santini, MFA in Photography Program Co-Director

The Austrian author Hugo Von Hofmannsthal wrote that music transforms time into space. This is perhaps a prerogative of photography too; converting time into light often builds a bridge between the invisible and the visible, between shadow and light. We always photograph something that waits for us (or escapes us) beyond the surface of the image. Looking, under the illusion of seeing, is like rummaging through the dark recesses of a drawer, in the penumbra, searching for something with your fingers rather than your eyes. To photograph, in essence, is to touch, to listen with the eyes. It is as much to record the present as to evoke the past, joining them in a nameless time that lives on in the fragile longevity of paper.

We often ask ourselves why we continue to take photographs when everyone around us is already compulsively doing so, why we add to the countless images already abandoned online, why we hope to bridge our need to make images to the desire for attention in others, between these two hypothetical needs.

Perhaps it was a client of the great 19th-century photographer Nadar who truly understood what photography is, and in what penumbra it flourishes. In an excerpt from Nadar’s diaries from nearly 150 years ago, he recounts a conversation between himself and a client: A man comes in (I guarantee this is not a joke!), chooses the type of portrait he wants, asks to pay, pays, and suddenly vanishes! Without even giving me the time to turn around…

With great excitement, someone exclaims: “What happened to him? Just a moment ago he was here! Hurry, run, he couldn’t have had the time to go down the stairs!...” They fly, rush, and eventually catch up to him and lead him back upstairs: “Sir, what about your portrait? … You still have to sit for it!”

Oh, as you wish. I had thought it was done…”

In the penumbra of these naïve words lies the disconcerting truth of photography. Photographers, sometimes unconsciously, use the visible, the present, in the same way that a man, tired from his day, comes home to a house darkened by his absence and flips the light switch on to reveal what awaits him. The visible is just the door.

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There is No There There Camilla Torna, MFA in Communication Design Program Director

Every generation has its own childhood memories to cherish. But also, or maybe mostly, each generation shares common childhood fantasies that cohabit with individual memories. When Baby Boomers (1945-63) around the world tried to imagine the fateful year 2000, all they saw were flying cars. Hanna-Barbera launched the Jetsons Family and its flying means of transport in 1962. In 1955 in France, Citroen with the DS (“Goddess”) had embodied this vision in a car that was celebrated

by Roland Barthes as a contemporary Nautilus transferring us into the future.

Generation X (1964-83) started to use the first personal computers with both zest and awe, but still placed them as giant backdrops for the above mentioned flying cars in Bladerunner (1982). Video chats are also displayed in the movie, as they are in the Jetsons cartoons and in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But what we still waited for, with a late-modern attitude, was a mechanical wonder.

The future came in through the backdoor. Few foresaw the impact of the World Wide Web and internet, not only on communication, but on our interaction with knowledge itself. This new paradigm emerged during the childhood of Generation Y, or Millennials (1984-1999), while they were familiarizing themselves with bitmap, playing the game Snake on their parents’ Nokia phones, watching SpongeBob on TV, or getting used to the acid color palette of Polly Pocket dolls.

The work of Alexandra Wong is a moving visual statement by a young designer, fully representative of the Millennial generation, about these and other icons that trigger nostalgia for the time of their early childhood in the US. In the “penombra” between analogic and digital in which Millennials navigate, the title’s Gertrude Stein quote, “There is no there there,” refers to a moment in time (more than a place) that seems impossible to reach. The semantic analysis of these icons leads to the intelligent question behind the research: How manipulable are we Millennials by brands that interpret our longing for an analogic childhood?

How does the awareness of our vulnerable emotional memory protect us from marketing strategies targeting our soft SpongeBob spots?

Wong is the first graduate of the SACI MFA in Communication Design program, a program that provides tools for reading our complex visual culture through the lenses of Legibility, Readability and Usability – the Semantics, Syntactics, and Pragmatics of Massimo Vignelli’s Canon.

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Artists

Jay Dexter MFA in Studio Art

A grotesque theater of violence and debauchery dramatized on a stage of canvas and paper.

These works subvert traditional decorative arts, metamorphose the human figure and the natural world – often represented by acanthus leaf and filigree – and challenge perceptions of known forms. With a baroque sense of pageantry, visual storytelling is enriched with an exploration of dream logic, liminal spaces, and nonlinear narratives. A considered study of mise-en-scène is used with motifs inspired by classical literature, folklore, and mythology, creating a rich visual language that flows continuously throughout each piece. This is all a futile attempt at escape.

Dexter is a nomadic bird with a proclivity for melodrama. London was their last port of call where they received a BA (hons) in Illustration from Camberwell College of Arts. Since then, they have been playing in the interstitial space between drawing and painting at SACI. Dexter plans to roam the world forever more until an eventual avalanche of drawings and books puts an end to their creative frenzy. jaydexter.com

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Jay Dexter

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Victoria Jane Elizabeth Hodge MFA in Studio Art

Victoria Jane Elizabeth Hodge MFA in Studio Art

This series of paintings is Hodge’s representation of how she organizes her past and looks forward to a new future, while still holding on to important memories.

The transition from one place or time to another is a process of breaking down what was originally perceived and then reconstructing a new perspective. Having grown up in the religious South of the United States, Hodge holds certain beliefs and personality traits that, during her time abroad, have morphed into a new perspective blending culture and identity. In this series, The Space Between, she explores the simplicity of the organization of thoughts, stories, past identity, diary entries, personality traits, and emotions.

The space between is where the transformation happens.

Victoria Hodge is a Southernborn American from Sumter, South Carolina. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. During the spring of 2014, she studied abroad in Florence, which later inspired her to return to Italy and pursue an MFA at SACI. Her work focuses on the time and space in which she lives and how they change between two moments or places in life.

Left: Through Which I See, gold and graphite on paper, 21x 14.7 cm, 2018 Right: Detail of From Then to Now, acrylic on linen, 120 x 80 x 4 cm, 2017

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Victoria Jane Elizabeth Hodge Left: From Then to Now, acrylic on linen, 120 x 80 x 4 cm, 2017 Top Right: Between Us, gold and graphite on paper, 21 x 14.7 cm, 2018 Bottom Right: Unbound Restoration, gold and graphite on paper, 21 x 14.7 cm, 2018

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Lindsey K. Johnson MFA in Studio Art

Lindsey K. Johnson MFA in Studio Art

Each of these works represents a pause in the artist’s life in which she looks back over the last eight years. Originally based on the idea of the female condition, the project evolved into a way for the artist to gain distance and see herself as a multifaceted individual. By utilizing the language of iconic symbolism, Johnson explores the different ways one may gain the perspective necessary to process major life events, while placing a particular emphasis on what it means to experience these events in a female-assigned body.

The creation of the series became a type of autobiographical navigation where buried problems and memories resurfaced, allowing the artist to translate their impact.

Each work acts as a mirror for the artist to observe herself and capture moments in time that were crucial to her development, while meditating on their broader connection to humanity. The paintings and stories emerge from eight themes: sisterhood, love, gender identity, destiny, matrilineage, spirituality, the body, and death.

Through this work she highlights the importance of understanding personal traumas, not as weaknesses, but as potential strengths that enable self-determination.

Lindsey Katharine Johnson is a Louisiana native born in 1990. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from McNeese State University with a concentration in painting, drawing, and ceramics. Since 2009, she has participated in solo and group shows in the United States and Italy. lindseykatharinejohnson.com

Left: my sister is my spirit guide, oil on linen, 150cm x 93cm, 2018 Right: Detail of when the heart is exposed, oil on linen, 150cm x 93cm, 2018

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Lindsey K. Johnson 24

Left: to have faith in art, oil on linen, 150cm x 93cm, 2018 Right: when the heart is exposed, oil on linen, 150cm x 93cm, 2018

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Cocoa Laney MFA in Photography

Attesa is a long-term documentary project focusing on a centro d’accoglienza straordinaria (center for temporary assistance) that accommodates migrants as they apply to remain in Italy legally. The process is often long and unpredictable and many applications are denied, but all one can do is wait. During this period of uncertainty, this isolated house in rural Tuscany is home to around twenty young men from central Africa, each bringing a different culture, background, language, and story.

Cocoa Laney is a documentary photographer from Huntsville, Alabama, whose work at SACI has largely focused on social themes, language, and communication.

She has a love for storytelling with both images and words; in fact, she considers photography to be her second language, while Italian is becoming her third. cocoalaney.com

Attesa, digital images, 2017-2018

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Cocoa Laney Attesa, digital images, 2017-2018

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Jane Mason MFA in Studio Art

Jane Mason MFA in Studio Art

Mason’s inspiration starts with two questions: Who am I? What am I? Discovering the Ego relies not on what she has accomplished, but on what she is eager to chase.

Confession 1. I want to be a painter forever. Creating art is strange, addictive, and, at the same time, a beautiful thing.

Confession 2. I want to leave the past behind, changing complex emotions such as emptiness, ignorance, and sorrow to positive ones.

Confession 3. I want a tattoo.

Confession 4. I want dyed hair.

Sometimes, going crazy is vital to life.

Big meaning and rustic wishes are compensated for through Mason’s self-portraiture, set in a contemporary context.

She focuses on balancing diverse brushstrokes and spatial relationships while using diverse compositions and contrasting colors to compare the past, present, and future.

Using narrative painting as an instrument with which to investigate interpersonal relationships, Mason explores traditional methods through a contemporary practice.

Jane Mason is self-taught artist who has experience working as a commissioned portrait painter.

She has earned several degrees with diverse majors both in the United States and abroad. After deciding to follow her desire to study art, she dedicated herself to years of training as an oil painter.

She studied traditional painting technique at Russian Academy of Art and contemporary art at SACI, where she is currently a 2018 MFA in Studio Art candidate.

Mason loves to capture the beauty of the figure with vibrant color and shifting focus to reflect the immediacy of working from life. In her pieces, she modifies the softness of the subject and uses contemporary subjects and techniques to alter traditional bold and impressionistic styles.

Detail of Ignorance, 150 x 240 cm, oil on canvas, 2017

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Jane Mason Top: Ignorance, 150 x 240 cm, oil on canvas, 2017 Bottom: Self-portrait 2, 120 x 150 cm, oil on canvas, 2018 Right: Self-portrait 1, 120 x 150 cm, oil on canvas, 2018

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Maria Khalid Nissan MFA in Studio Art

18,443 Souls is a communitybased sensorial installation composed of large-scale textiles created from used coffee and tea filters that are draped throughout the space as an expansion of local community and a reflection of multicultural identity. Coffee filters collected from two places that heavily influence the artist’s identity – Athens, GA, and Florence, Italy – were transformed by sewing them into monumental tapestries and sculptural forms. Community outreach involving filters from local restaurants resulted in an ongoing transatlantic dialogue between the artist, restaurant staff, and patrons. Each coffee filter has been used by twenty people. At this stage, a total of 18,443 people have contributed to the art piece, forming a new sense of community. This installation emboldens the fabric of the community, threading together the diverse ways in which coffee culture, as a shared experience, organically mends international exchange.

Maria Nissan is an installation artist and a 2018 MFA in Studio Art candidate at Studio Arts College International, with a bachelor’s degree in art education and a minor in painting and drawing from the University of Georgia.

She taught art at Athens Academy and worked as a ceramicist for Winterhawk Pottery before moving to Florence, Italy, to pursue her master’s degree. Over the past year and a half, Maria has created immersive sensorial installations that merge cultures and communities. The installations include different materials, evoke all senses, and have a strong performative aspect. Her work creates experiences through the transformation and manipulation of recycled and organic materials.

“My work investigates the central themes of cultural identity and ethereal conceptions of ‘home.’ Being from an Iraqi, Assyrian family with an American education, my fractured background generates my desire to create multicultural art projects. These projects bind together diverse and sometimes opposed tendencies in my own being, as well as the cultures in the countries where I develop my artwork.” marianissan.com

18,443 Souls, coffee filters, installation, 2018

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Maria Khalid Nissan 18,443 Souls, coffee filters, installation, 2018

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Margareta Sköld MFA in Photography

The project brings together several dimensions of Margareta’s previous work that developed the notions of fragmentation, memories, and change. In this project, she uses black and white photographs from the late 1940s taken by her father, and combines them with her own photographs of torn posters. By bringing the past to the present through fragments and layers, the work evokes a sense of memory, one that is not always precise and that does not always have clear boundaries. The effect of time on the posters and the visual dialogue between the past and the present also reflects the notion of connectedness in the impermanence of life.

Margareta Sköld, from Sweden, holds an M.Sc in Health Policy and Planning from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine/ London School of Economics.

Following a long career in International Health, during which she traveled extensively and lived in several different countries, she decided to pursue her strong interest in photography. During her two years at SACI, led by intuition and a spirit of discovery, she has explored in depth her visual expression and creativity. In this process, she has used analogue and digital photography as well as alternative photographic printing techniques.

Digital inkjet prints on Baryta paper, 60 x 90 cm, 2018

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Margareta Skรถld

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Digital inkjet prints on Baryta paper, 60 x 90 cm, 2018

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Alexandra Wong MFA in Communication Design

There is no there there April 17-30 Caffè Letterario Le Murate Piazza delle Murate Florence, Italy “The etymology of nostalgia is a portmanteau of two Greek words: nostos meaning the return home and algia referring to the sensation of pain or suffering.”

The images in Alexandra Wong’s illustrated exit paper explore the shift between ‘nostalgia,’ defined as a longing for a physical place and a place in time that can no longer be reached – in this case, the 1990s. What does this shift mean for the identity of the millennial generation? They were born in an analog era and reached adulthood in a digital one. How does this shift influence the way in which they direct their buying power and, in turn, how they are being marketed to?

Alexandra Wong is a digital illustrator and designer. Her illustration work primarily focuses on social issues and is stylistically reflective of her background in fine art, the concentration of her BFA achieved at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. She has been living in Florence, Italy, for the past several years, where she began her studies in design, taking a particular interest in print media and brand identity. alexandrawongart.com

Sick Dude, digital, 210 x 297 mm, 2018

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Alexandra Wong

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Left: New Memento Mori, digital, 210 x 297 mm, 2018 Right: Swiss Guard, digital, 210 x 297 mm, 2018

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Studio Arts College International Master of Fine Art Programs

SACI’s community of MFA students works in a creative environment of rigorous critical and technical inquiry utilizing the unique artistic and cultural resources of Florence, Italy, to prepare students for careers as artists and college instructors. For a duration of two years, students live and work in the city that, during the Renaissance, revolutionized art and has since served as an inspiration and catalyst for generations of artists.

By exploiting fully the advantages available to emerging artists through advanced study in Florence, SACI MFA students can become highly competitive when seeking an artistic professional career and university level teaching positions. Throughout their lives, they will be able to realize work reflecting their unique experience and deep understanding of Italian art and the nature of the artist’s role in society.

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EXHIBITION This catalog is published in conjunction with the exhibitions PENOMBRA at Galleria Il Ponte, via di Mezzo, 42/b, Florence, Italy, from the 19-23th of April 2018 and THERE IS NO THERE THERE at Caffè Letterario Le Murate, Piazza delle Murate, Florence, Italy, from the 17-30th of April 2018. The exhibitions feature the final projects 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 Steven Brittan (SACI President), Filipe Rocha da Silva (Director, MFA in Studio Art), Romeo Di Loreto and Jacopo Santini (Co-Directors, MFA in Photography), Camilla Torna (Director, MFA in Communication Design) EXHIBITION TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE Luca Carosi GRAPHIC DESIGN / COVER DESIGN Christina Gednalske / Alexandra Wong PHOTO CREDITS Jacopo Santini and the artists COPY EDITING Christina Gednalske / Marie-Louise Lodge / Anne Châtellier Pellegrini PRINTED BY Litografia I.P. - Florence, Italy Studio Arts College International Palazzo dei Cartelloni Via Sant’Antonino, 11 50123 Florence, Italy info@saci-florence.edu www.saci-florence.edu Copyright © 2018 Studio Arts College International, SACI Press. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 9788885495012