sva mfa fine arts Samuel T. Adams Vanessa Black Amber Boardman Jennifer Brantley Jin Kyoung Bom Zoe Chan Tré Chandler Noa Charuvi Brandon Davey Áslaug Íris Katrín Fridjónsdottir Rebecca Goyette Alejandro Guzman Yuhi Hasegawa Hai-Hsin Huang Molaundo Jones Kahori Kamiya
2009
Egill Karlsson Hye Ryung Lee Paul Limperopulos Gregg Louis Kathleen Mallaney Cameron McPherson Habby Osk Jabari Owens-Bailey Min Pang Stacy Scibelli Christina Sucgang Curver Thoroddsen Trish Tillman Theodoros Zafiropoulos Shai Zurim
David L. Shirey, chair JP Forrest, assistant to the chair Tina DeRamus, assistant to the chair Faculty: Sharon Fleischmann Aquavita Polly Apfelbaum Dan Cameron Petah Coyne Monroe Denton Kenji Fujita Johan Grimonprez Mary Heilmann Will Insley Ken Landauer Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt Michelle Lopez Stephen Maine Suzanne McClelland Marilyn Minter Lucio Pozzi João Ribas David Row Jerry Saltz David L. Shirey James Siena Amy Smith-Stewart Gary Stephan Julianne Swartz William Wegman Jacqueline Winsor
Heterotopia Curated by: Summer Guthery, Lumi Tan, and Nicholas Weist January 16, 2009 through January 31, 2009 Reception: Thursday, January 22, 2009, 6–8pm Cardsharper Curated by: Lauren Ross, curator of the Brooklyn Museum February 27, 2009 through March 14, 2009 Reception: Thursday, March 5, 2009, 6–8pm Visual Arts Gallery 601 West 26 Street, 15th Floor New York, NY 10001 212.592.2145
Catalog Forward
david l. shirey
Chair, MFA Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts
The artists in these two theses exhibition embody the essences of the MFA Fine Arts program. The artists are all of consummate accomplishment, a collectanea of individual sensibilities whose artistic utterances reflect an encompassing and complex level of intellectual, emotional and spiritual expressions. While they are all united in their achievements, they each display a personal world of thought, soul and feeling. And it is this opulent array of stylistic and expressive statements that emanates a richness of experiential significance.
Pedagogical Sketches Stephen Maine
On May 15, 2009, SVA’s graduate program in Fine Arts will bid its first post-crash class goodbye and good luck. Though it is still unclear what the global economic turmoil of late 2008 bodes for the working lives of artists, the damage will be extensive. This class is the first to have to face the music, to face the fearsome sound of checkbooks everywhere slamming shut. So Miami wasn’t a ghost town during last December’s art fairs, as some had feared it would be. The irony still stings for the products of our highly “professional” program: money is flowing out of the art world arena just as they are preparing to enter it. As a result, expectations for quick visibility and market success have already been lowered and might yet come into line with where they were 30 years ago. Then, slow maturation was expected before youthful yammering would become a coherent voice that distinguishes itself by having something to say. Is this giant step backward so bad? Day jobs and teaching gigs will sap the strength of contenders, but those obstacles will also discourage pretenders.
There are answers, and then there are questions. How can I get a gallery, live off my work, professionalize my practice is a pressing question (if infrequently asked directly of faculty) but not one of the more interesting ones. More interesting questions are: What is the function of the artist in a society beguiled by branding? How can art production and distribution respond to the Internet-driven revolution in social networks? Should art and life be blurred, really, when much of life is tedious? In the absence of linguistic meaning, can abstract art be funny? Why does painting remain indispensable? The MFA studios are housed among the upper floors of a stately old building just east of Chelsea. I have come to think of this dense entanglement of workspaces as the Rainforest. A fecund if at times hostile environment, it teems with exotic forms of life: skittish, scuttling creatures; solitary nocturnal beasts; the occasional camouflaged predator. Survival strategies vary widely, from ostentatious plumage to protective coloration; competition for resources can test the most benign coexistence. The students who thrive in the Rainforest negotiate a balance between the solitude and focus of studio work and the obligations incumbent upon participants in a group effort enacted in a shared space—between selfishness and collective engagement. They become prepared to both give and take. “A realization of the individual creative spirit and promise,” is an official goal of our program, but social capital and a profound interdependence have long been art world realities as well.
This year’s MFA candidates are far too diverse to display anything like a cohesive identity, much less sound a theme. Any such group has its contrarians, fringe players, outliers, weirdos. The strongest artists here transcend narcissistic self-regard and take a position in relation to prevailing cultural conditions. They are not content merely to fashion forms that express their emotional life, handicraft habits, or autobiographical happenstance. You can do that in a shack in the hills, without suffering the indignities of the F train to 23rd Street. The best work from the Rainforest isn’t passive, doesn’t “reflect” anything. It has an opinion. I once had a teacher who liked to tell us that our work should embody our unique personal perversion, by which I think he meant the eccentricities of our enthusiasms. It seems to me now that such a self-portrait is of widest interest when it is devised and deployed with an awareness of the historical, social and political context. The artist then contributes to a common visual culture, rather than just scratching an itch. That artist also makes a stronger bid for audience. Some work coming out of the Rainforest partakes of broader trends, as in schizophrenic paintings that assume the spacehogging personality of sculpture. Other preoccupations are localized and inexplicable, such as a recent flurry of casting on a small scale, often to fabricate components of a larger work. There is less video than in recent years though what video there is, is better. In the Rainforest, students try on hats at least as much as they delve into their psyches. This is healthy. They are young. The refining fire of studio toil, decades of it, will distinguish fruitful infatuation from whim.
I have fond hopes for the members of this class, and enormous confidence that their ability, drive and curiosity will overcome the handicap of poor market timing. I am optimistic about them in the long term, and not just because of the paradigm shifter they recently helped send to the White House. This is the first class, after all, in the history of our program to get their act together to produce a catalog of their thesis projects. An art instructor at the graduate level is engaged in a tricky business. It is easy to tell a student what you would like to see them shoot for, but how do you teach someone to knock your socks off with the unexpected? In its finest form, teaching implies an exchange of information, not a conduit from source to receptacle. Whenever I am aghast that a student has never heard of a watershed exhibition, or an historical movement, or an artist my generation considers an Olympian, I remember those who have turned me on to a reference that is, for them, old hat. So we use old forms and an old vocabulary to stimulate the invention of new forms and a new vocabulary. We do so through cycles of unraveling and consolidating, demolition and reconstruction. The resulting conversation is most disorienting and exciting for me when I am useless to my students, when I have many more questions than answers, when I don’t really know what they’re talking about.
samuel t. adams samueltadams@gmail.com www.samueltadams.net Cincinnati, OH
opposite: White Noise I, 2008, ink, acrylic, acetate on panel, 52" x 48" x 2" above: The Curtain, 2008, ink, acrylic, acryla gouache on panel, 42" x 48" x 2"
My energy as a painter stems from current events, literature, travel, cultural phenomena, from the observed and the imagined. I am not a storyteller, a philosopher, or a stage director; my main concern is painting. I am interested not in conveying a linear narrative, but perhaps its shadow, a gesture of representation. My paintings lie somewhere between the familiar and strikingly other. I do not believe paintings should have a fixed meaning; they should reflect the flux of being in this world. I am interested in the discomfort, incoherence, and, most of all, the absurdity that can characterize the painterly experience—and experience in general.
vanessa black vanessacblack@gmail.com www.vanessablack.com New York, NY
“I’ve been around the world a million times and all you men are slime…” 100% by Sonic Youth
We are taught to be polite well-behaved women. We fear speaking our minds. When we exhibit strength, we are labeled and called names. My raw emotions allow me to face these fears. I seek freedom from our culture’s narrow concepts of beauty. I find refuge in the grotesque. I create abandoned goddesses and diseased forms that expose their hidden ugliness, ultimately revealing truth and beauty. My source material is extremely important and becomes part of the work. I collect fashion magazines, song lyrics, and inspiring quotes. opposite: I Don’t Feel Good Today, 2008, mixed media above: Just Another Girl Lining up to Die, 2008, mixed media
amber boardman amberboardman@gmail.com www.amberboardman.com Atlanta, GA
I want to expose the absurd in the familiar. I want to make everyday occurrences seem extraordinary and worthy of examination. My interest in this subject comes from the freedom in knowing that I can re-imagine my place in the world by re-imagining quotidian life. It comes from the desire for self-containment. I don’t want to need more than what is in front of me and I’d like to notice what I have already seen and heard. With a receptive attitude I can get large amounts of pleasure from small things. This attitude requires humility and curiosity but also irreverence. My observation is not rigid and it is not passive.
opposite: Daily, 2008, watercolor on paper, audio recording, duration 1:38 above: Voicemail, 2008, graphite on paper, voicemail recording, MIDI piano, duration 1:37
The spirit of this non-rigid attitude extends to the mediums and materials used to represent each idea resulting in sound pieces, animation, drawings, installation, etc.
jin kyoung bom bravejk@gmail.com www.jkbom.com Seoul, Korea
opposite: Kirstin Dunst Going Shopping, 2008, photograph and wire above: Untitled, 2007, photograph and wire
I’m interested in the power of the gaze that exists everywhere in society. I use paparazzi pictures on the internet as a maximized form of gaze. The distorted figures in my works reflect the emotional response by the target of such gaze as the exposure relegates the individual to an object. In order to address this issue, I draw on such ideas as the notion of the panopticon, the Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, and the Surplus-Enjoyment by Slavoj Zizek.
jennifer brantley jennypennydesigns@gmail.com Fairfax, VA
opposite: Rope and Root, 2008, mixed media above: Cock a Doodle Doo, 2008, mixed media
Suspended off the wall, or woven into the wall, these works are not fully grounded nor given to the air. My sculptural sketches consist of steel wire and abandoned and seemingly insignificant materials. I have always been a scavenger collecting treasures like rusty bottle cap’s, seedpods and broken pieces of mirror riddled with spider cracks. These works explore the formal relationships between materials and the physical environment as they weave through it. I am inspired by an objects ability to be a visual signifier and informer of memory. To instill these abandoned or overlooked objects with new life is, to me, not only creating a dialogue between nature and culture but also an act of affirmation.
zoe chan design@zoechan.com www.zoechan.com/sculpture New York, NY
opposite: DEADFAST, 2008, video above: The Odds Are With You, 2008, Performance & Sculpture, 32 x 18 x 18"
I am engaged in an exercise in self-appraisal. An experiment in documentation. An archive of experience. A translation of emotion into measurable units. I question the physical activity of being an artist by creating frameworks that explore my relationship to my artistic practice, my personal history and my interior life. What is a memory? Can it be measured? What happens when you try to a create a system to archive experience? Is a system of definition and measurement simultaneously a system of confinement? What does it say about the nature of definitions and of language? I approach these questions with my own form of scientific analysis, which takes the form of measurementbased sculptures combined with poetic self-definition and active performative engagement with my viewer. I explore how defining something confines the truths about it. Symbols themselves are arbitrary and succeed only because they are agreed upon. There are possibilities for interpretation, translation and margins of error—all of which offer the potential for new experiences and insights.
trĂŠ chandler trechandler@hotmail.com Landstuhl, Germany
opposite: Hot-To-Trot Penus, 2008 collage on paper above: Untitled, 2007 ink on paper
All my life I have had an obsession with characters and the fluidity of identity. I see my art practice as a deeply personal, transformative, and directly responsive act, forming relationships with a variety of imagery and media in a bid to try and stay engaged with a visual society of sedated complacency. My work is typically couched in opaque narratives populated with outrageous characters, each one unraveling dimensions of the self.
noa charuvi noacharuvi@gmail.com www.noacharuvi.com Jerusalem, Israel
opposite: Untitled, 2008, Oil and gesso on canvas, 30" x 38" above: Untitled, 2008, oil on canvas, 12" x 15"
I paint rubble as a portrait of the human condition. Any pile of ruins holds memories, moments in time. I am the witness of destruction, not the destroyed, not the destroyer. My work contains a sense of documentation but also of universality, since the places in the paintings are not anchored to a specific event. I describe demolished buildings based on published photographs of Palestine. The photographs are the only way I witness them, and so they become the only reality. The paintings present the absurdity of that reality, but at the same time create a composition of color and shape that is purely formal, evoking beauty and harmony. The experience of the work is therefore a mix of pleasure and terror.
brandon davey daveycrockettman@yahoo.com Las Vegas, NV
opposite: Untitled (Arm fisting pillow), 2008, plaster, clay, paint above: Untitled (Arm fisting pillow), 2008, plaster, clay, paint
I make artwork to feel the newness of ideas. I work quickly as to not get bored or distracted, but I do get bored and distracted, and much of my work goes unfinished. The satisfaction of finishing is not nearly as addictive as the excitement of beginning. My studio is filled with drawings, objects, and experiments once loved, then left, trashed, broken, or lost. I am stress testing both my materials and my ideas, and I revisit the things that continue to resurface in my thoughts. I investigate and edit their strengths, and this becomes my finished work.
áslaug íris katrín fridjónsdottir aslaugiriskatrin@gmail.com www.aslaugiriskatrin.com Reykjavík, Iceland
opposite: Untitled, cardboard box and paint above: Kiss, paper, paint, plastic bags
I’m attracted to the kind of art that almost isn’t art. I like to place myself on the thin line between something and nothing. I use un-monumental materials like cardboard boxes, leftover wood, tape, plastic and paint. I enjoy experimenting with these mundane materials, using the paint on them in abstract ways and thereby creating a contrast between the raw material and the thoughtful gesture.
rebecca goyette rebogallery@gmail.com www.rebogallery.com Townsend, MA
opposite: Becky Boom Boom, Missile Dick Chick, 2008 above: Hester Sin, Gallows Hill Playground, 2008
My performative works provoke and engage the viewer through historical analogy, physical comedy and burlesque deviancy. A fascination rooted in my New England heritage, I create fetishized Americana. Through direct engagement as a street performer, I witness and gauge desires, anxieties and disparities within our culture. Performing in the streets, my costume is my portable theater and I act in real time, outside of my ideological comfort zone. Only by inserting my character back into conservative culture can she speak, the tension is between the psychology of the participants and the character that mirrors them. The experience I gather as a performer is shared in the context of constructed social space, through video, object and story sharing.
alejandro guzman Aguzman2@mac.com Vega Baja, Puerto Rico
opposite: Untitled, Ink Drawing, 2008 above: Tata Campo Santo Media Noche, Silver Gelatin Print, 2008
I make drawings, paintings and photographs that mix contemporary and ancient details describing hybridity amongst people. Our ancestors are our guides, they leave information behind. My drawing compositions develop as hybrid forms in nature, and become populated with objects, ceremonial altars and symbolic entities that link old and new spirits. My photographs of spiritualists evoke worship and ancestral rites, inherent to our shared universal background.
yuhi hasegawa mokugyohead@gmail.com Kyoto, Japan
opposite: The Day I Became Innocent, 2008, oil on canvas 35" x 39" above: A Dance, 2008, oil on canvas, 59" x 104"
For me, painting is a necessity of my imagination. I pursue the embodiment of an elaborate fantasy world that can only exist in paintings. I am interested in the instinctive and primitive qualities of human beings, such as animalism and ritualization. Through the process of painting I want to reveal the concealable inner meanings of human behaviors in private and public situations. These behaviors constantly sway between the extremes of innate, and acquired human characteristics. My painting is not literal narratives, rather dark suggestion of the hybrids from nomadic and urban existences, sophisticated and barbarian in equal measure.
hai-hsin huang HHHuang510@gmail.com http://hhhuang.com Taipei, Taiwan
opposite: Speaker, 2008, 11" x11", oil on canvas above: Conference 10, 2008, 55" x 83", oil on paper
I am a figurative painter. My works explore public images indicative of contemporary life. Particular mass media images reveal to me an ambiguous atmosphere between humor and horror: safety instructions, ribbon cutting ceremonies, political conferences, etc. I explore the threat of violence and fear in society, the absurdity and the loneliness behind these politically-correct, capitalistic images. However, life is full of contradictions, I’m not ridiculing anything or making any demands, but rather outlining a kind of lighthearted contradiction which makes use of the context of signage to create the effect of a symbolic self-negation.
molaundo jones Molaundo@yahoo.com www.molaundo.com New York, NY
opposite: Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair, 36" x 36", acrylic, matte medium, gloss medium above: Lady Day, 36" x 36", acrylic, matte medium, gloss medium
Conceptions of identity, belonging, beauty, and valuation of the Self in the African American experience is embedded in the content of much of my work. My selection of certain musicians as vehicles to explore such notions is based largely on thesociopolitical implications inherent in most Black music as well as the importance of music to my studio practice. I attempt to capture and isolate moments of intensity and stoicism, creating an environment that engages the viewer through stark juxtapositions of shadow and light.
kahori kamiya Kaho0502@mac.com Nagoya, Japan
opposite: Project A, mixed media, video, sound above: Project B, video, 11min
Interpersonal relationships are shaped by a subconscious instinct of force. My work forms a space to escape from the over-controlled world. My installational work manifests the space between the external shell of preconceptions and the internal core of pure instinct. This intermediate space is explored through sculpture and video, which illustrates the frustration of being manipulated. In essence, it is as if I voluntarily stop to breathe to make sure that I am in control, and that I am not indeed ruled by outside forces. Using objects such as business shirts, colorful pacifiers, a broken computer, an IV, wrappings of clear plastic, and a hidden teddy bear, I try to deconstruct the symbols of personal dogma. Working with sculpture and drawing, I explore liberating my instinctual identity. When the visceral sculpture, the chaotic videos, and my ritualized performance are combined together, a complex psychological portrait emerges.
egill karlsson egill.kalevi@gmail.com www.EgillKaleviKarlsson.com ReykjavĂk, Iceland
I am interested in the projections of things, things that radiate frequencies into their environment. An aura. Light is part of this spectrum of frequencies that you see and feel. In a sense I work like a scientist, but my experiments are based on feeling. A combination of conscious and subconscious. I am in a dialog with nature. In the Bouquet project, I go around NYC and pick up flowers from flower-stands at delis. I take them home and put them in water, find the brightest spot in my apartment and wait until they are in full bloom. Then I take them to my basement and dip them in resin that puts a shell around them at their ripest. Then I paint the frozen flower in exaggerated vivid colors that reflect a lot of light.
opposite: Bouquet 2, mixed media above: Bouquet 1, mixed media
hye ryung lee lhr0310@gmail.com Seoul, Korea
opposite: Reflection I, 2008, 36" x 60", oil on canvas above: Reflection II, 2008, 36" x 60", oil on canvas
I am always the first one who spots a knitted object in a place. My obsession with knitted objects started in college. I had drawn a lot of nudes until one day a hanging sweater caught my eyes. As a child, I often spent time alone because my busy parents left my two siblings with my grandmother. My longing for attachment, warmth, and care, remained latent, though, until I discovered the beauty of drawing repetitive patterns of knitted sweaters. For a while, I found comfort and warmth in my sweater works, conforming to a boundary surrounding them. My journey with the sweaters to the streets of Manhattan followed my departure from South Korea. Soon after I arrived in America, I realized that I could not avoid defining myself by what I am not. A knitted scarf and the reflection of the street captured on the same show window, hence, represents the change I have experienced over the past year. It is the contrast between reality and reflection and the blending of the two that my sweater works have grown into.
paul limperopulos paulmlimperopulos@hotmail.com New Jersey
opposite: Time, photograph of kinetic drawing above: Breath, photograph of kinetic drawing
I am interested in semiotics and more specifically semantics. My concern within this study is in visually elucidating indeterminate language through analysis of denotation and connotation. The process operates as a search for the tangible presence of words, ideas, expressions and senses that lack form and are often invisible.
gregg louis gwlouis@gmail.com www.gregglouisart.com St. Louis, MO
opposite: 8 Hour Drawing: Done While Sleeping, 2008 charcoal on bed above: This Moment, 2007, performance
I am constantly getting older. Time is constant. A simultaneous simultaneous moment can create an instance where I can exist twice within one moment. An echo can create an instance where I can exist once in a series of separate moments. The ultimate goal of my work is to establish my position within the limits of time, and to search for the moments of freedom that I can create for myself in order to defy these limits.
kathleen mallaney kathleenmallaney@gmail.com Chicago, IL
opposite: Headbanger, 2008, Two Toilet Seats, 71 Tubes of Lipstick, Acrylite, 71 Screws, and Wood, 15" x 30" x 15" (installation) above: Headbanger, 2008, Two Toilet Seats, 71 Tubes of Lipstick, Acrylite, 71 Screws, and Wood, 15" x 30" x 15" (performance)
I use prefabricated objects from dollar stores to access the folklore surrounding domestic life. Thru the language of painting I transgress the collective fictions of these objects.
cameron mcpherson mcphersonc@gmail.com cameronmcpherson.com Oakland, CA
opposite: Vertical Analysis, digital print, 64" x 40" above: Tiger’s Leap, 8' x 14' x 9' 6"
My work is an abstract investigation of agency, location, context and space. As the artist-agent I manipulate the environment to evoke a dialogue between objectivity and subjectivity, illumination and concealment, control and chaos. Whether it is by introducing an unnatural material in a natural space, like industrial-grade plastic wrap in the woods, or deconstructing intimate space, like my studio, my work enacts my reaction to the boundaries of space. It is an obsession with material memory that guides my work—the cuts, stains, and physical arrangement that preserves origins, experience, and history. My art making examines the impact of grand gestures and the power of subtle gestures to invite viewers, sometimes against their will, to participate in a visceral spatial experience.
habby osk habbyosk@gmail.com www.habbyosk.com Akureyri, Iceland/New York, USA
Human nature. People’s psychological functions or more malfunctions is what I explore with my work. Consciously and unconsciously people express with their body emotions, thoughts and state of being. I use the human body as a medium and in a medium. The body becomes a tool to translate and communicate the subjects of my work.
opposite: Negotiation 2008, video above: Great! 2008, video
jabari owens-bailey jabariob@yahoo.com www.Marginalized365.com Washington,DC
opposite: Untitled ( We Gotta Save, Incised Gordon Matta Clark), paint, dry wall, vinyl faux brick pattern, styrofoam, spakle, blackness above: Show Us Your Smile, video, printed frosted glass, blackness
My work is about irony. As a backdrop ideas of race, culture, and agency are used as source material. The work is engaged with the history of visual culture. Often I use conventions as means of subversion. The “Show Your Smile� installation, for instance, was about how opulence and exploitation are hinged upon one another. Images of Louis Armstrong smiling, a mouth stuffed with cigarettes, and diamond clad teeth were each flattened by their proximity to one another. The Incised Graffiti Gordon Mata-Clark and We Gotta Save wall text are both using a convention of writing on walls. We Gotta Save uses the ridiculousness of placement for destruction of importance while the incised piece is about the excavation or shrouding of vandalism. Images and ideas taken away from their initial context fall into the realm of the absurd in their union giving life to my work.
min pang minpang@gmail.com Seoul, Korea
opposite: Untitled, 2008, oil on canvas, photographs above: Untitled, 2008, oil on canvas
My paintings are a result of how I take the world in, my attitude toward being a citizen of the world. I don’t actively set up situations or create new images; instead I use passive processes to make aggressive paintings. My process is a combination of my hypocritical acts, passive and aggressive, the product being paradoxically abstract and representative, looking emotionally charged and feeling removed. I take snapshots while tilting the camera, often ending up with poetic moments in mundane settings. The shots are often blurry, with vertical movement, with some evidence of familiar objects; a kitchen cabinet, a table, and a ceiling. I then print it out and paint it, without changing any plastic element. The images look very abstract, but it is evident that they are not made up, they come from a real, once not-abstract places. They are in the twilight between everyday living space and its accident, tragic, psychedelic, or funny. A TV screen turns into a shape of a flying object, a couch is being dissolved. A door is becoming a black hole, a ladder is just a streak of dark red, and a grey corner of the ceiling is simultaneously clashing and overlapping with a milky way of purple which is hard to decipher.
stacy scibelli stacyalexis@gmail.com www.stacyascibelli.com Valatie, NY
opposite: Utopia Parkway, 2008, sculpture/costume, fabric above: War, 2008, video still
My sculptures embody a formalism that addresses balance and fragility with a quintessential painterly logic. Using non-traditional materials and embracing practices involving skill and craft, I explore absurdity and superhero theatricality. Both art and craft are deeply rooted in history. Craft embraces tradition and culture, while art aches to defy these things. Craft is done by people, art is made by gods. I aim to linger between these polar opposite worlds. My work considers notions of vulnerability and control. I find the permeation of impotence and fear of shortcomings a matter which is best portrayed through the utter humor that exists between violence and the preposterous. I am interested in failure and desperation as it pertains to our own demise and what we must do to cope with that reality. Ultimately, my work is about avoiding death.
christina sucgang christinasucgang@gmail.com www.christinasucgang.com Moreno Valley, CA
opposite: Space Between Molecules, 2008, 16" x 17", oil on linen above: Buddy, 2008, 15" x 16", oil on linen
I am creating non-representational paintings that explore ideas of weight, balance, color relationships, while considering installation to incite an informative dialogue. I am developing a visual vocabulary which derives from multiple influences resulting in a cycle of disparate styles. Music, painters, weather, and family matter are all relevant. Since all of the influences are so diverse, the vocabulary is sometimes more colorful or more physical than others. The atmosphere hangs in one frame and solidifies in the next. I leave unpainted borders of canvas or linen, and other times I simulate the unpainted borders with pigment. Experimentation is necessary to constantly revise my visual language. Scale is important, and I prefer to develop a quiet authority through small support. A whisper that builds upon itself, resonates, and engulfs the viewer. Brushstrokes travel horizontally like sustained notes. Compositions and color choices are executed in spontaneous rhythms resulting in sometimes dissonant chords. When the disparate paintings are grouped and installed together, expectations are broken and yet become unified much like white noise or the urban hum.
curver thoroddsen curver@gmail.com www.ghostigital.com ReykjavĂk, Iceland
opposite: Ups and Downs, 2007, music performance for elevator above: Empire, 2008, video installation
I look to blur the line between art and everyday life. Autobiographical, performative and humorous in nature, my work is diverse and has energy. In my relational projects I utilize my exhibitionism and playfulness in a direct, sincere and concrète way to create happenings. I like playing with the boundaries and definition of art and mix different genres, disciplines and worlds together. Exploring a fusion of fine arts, personal life and popular culture. For me the visual is not the most significant aspect of an artwork. Experience is the ultimate.
trish tillman tt@trishtillman.com www.trishtillman.com Chicago, IL
opposite: Dressed in Mourning, 2008, wood, polyurethane, latex, 60" x 72" x 24" above: Flash Point, 2008, wood, polyurethane, 19" x 7" x 5.5"
Since human instinct is a selective mixture of biological and social factors, the way one’s instincts are shaped relies partially on how one’s memory deciphers information passing through the gray area between storage and retrieval. I am interested in the way one’s memories change over time, tangling and untangling as knowledge both clogs and disintegrates from that gray area, confusing reality and hopeful truths. I use sculpture and drawing to excavate the hidden aspects in one’s memory by suggesting that which has been ignored or forgotten has an actual physical presence. I work with imagery such as black holes, unearthed crystals, caves, household air filters and waste drainage systems to manifest this physical presence. Non-verbal cues from found film footage are highlighted in my video work, portraying the moments of one gazing in admiration or disgust, slowing down moments where characters are trying to formulate opinions based on their knowledge and emotions.
theodoros zafiropoulos t_zafiropoulos@yahoo.com Kalamata, Greece
Please Insulate Me: A Duct-tape dwelling installation tent, capsule, a penetrable cave. The installation allegorically can be the model for permanent emergency housing possibilities after hurricanes or unpredicted menaces. Please Moisturize Me: The Duct-tape melts with the use of a heat-gun. The primary cubic size of the material turns into compact pieces that stretch into a web of yellow acrylic yarn. The missing moisture of the material returns through the enigmatic smell of baby-powder that covers the structure. Please Participate Me: The left over from the previous installation transformed into object of experimentation in the hands of the 63 students of the MFA program. The community-socialized material now creates a series of documented performances. The material becomes an expressive tool for the collective and I, the artist, become the passive observer, implementing the rules of the process.
Please Maintain Me: The main idea of the project is to identify possibilities of maintaining a materialized activity. These four sequential projects were designed and characterized to open a critical dialogue between materials and utility. Each project is the result of continuous recycling and arranging a variety of formal, conceptual and aesthetic aspects. In the four stages of transformation, my main concern was to engage viewers as active collaborators and eyewitness participants of my practice. The failure of material can be translated into commencement of a new idea. The four projects are intended to create a dialogue with the viewer while attempting to allude to permanent housing, smell of ruins, social contribution, socialization, and law and order. The importance of constant transfiguration from project to project is based on my trust in ephemeral environments and unmonumental constructions that are made not to remain but to exist. opposite: Please Insulate Me, Duct Tape Please Moisturize Me, Melted duct tape ,acrylic yarn, baby powder, yellow fluorescence Please Participate Me, Melted duct tape, baby powder, 31 participants, video projection, audio sound Please Maintain me, Melted duct tape, baby powder, public compressor
shai zurim shai@shaizurim.com www.shaizurim.com Givatime, Israel
opposite: Sticky Rice, mixed media, 75" x 15" x 15" above: Worms & Lions, Exhibition view, space sizes: 35' X 45', 2008
In an era of individual identity crisis, my work paradoxically attempts to reconstruct the relevance of the artist as a romantic figure. My concern is to find a positive aspect in our perilous state of narcissism, egoism, boredom, neurosis and existential anxiety – lives lacking in purpose and community- in short lives of spiritual emptiness. My work responds to the changing nuances of every-day life. This awareness dictates the conceptual methods of my work, which uses materials taken from our rubbish, our clichés and banalities, which I transform in the spirit of alchemy. In order to ground high art in the banal, everyday things, and reveal the present, I work with the mobility and quickness of drawing, I use common and throwaway materials, which I assemble into “made on the spot” sculptures, or short-lived installations. I employ a mixture of styles, voices and medias. By restoring meaning as a composed unity of separate things, I hope to create art that responds to the world and to daily life at eye level, and to reinstate the possibilities of the individual within the global world.
sva mfa fine arts 2009