VCFA
MFA VISUAL ARTS CLASS OF WINTER 2012
A dark horse, which had never been thought of, rushed past the grandstand in sweeping triumph. - Benjamin Disraeli
VCFA MFA W12
LAURA ALGER LAUREN BARTONE PAUL BENAVIDEZ MARGARET CARSELLO CHIAPPETTA DAWN PARSONS FELLER NATALIE FINKELSTEIN JANETTE HAYHOE SUSANNE JAKLIN CATHY JONES MILDRED KENNEDY-STIRLING JEFF ROTH ELISA WIEDEMAN
VCFA MFA W12
LAURA ALGER
VCFA MFA W12
LAUREN BARTONE
FORM #1, ENGLISH Acrylic paint on paper 3’ x 4’, 2011
A FREE LUNCH Cardboard food packaging 4’ x 8’, 2011
Laura K. Alger is a Feminist Artist whose artwork deals with topics of Craft Culture, Domesticity, Humor, Isolation, Feminism, and Fashion. She works in a variety of mediums such as sewing, embroidery, quilting, drawing, and performance to name a few. Currently she lives in Austin, Texas with her future husband Greg and her dog Roger.
I am in the habit of looking everywhere for patterns; patterns emerging, forming and unraveling. Such patterns could be small details in the physical reality of my day, or the larger social structures that frame my actions. Either way, I have often felt that my job as an artist is to seek out and pay attention to these examples of daily life moving between chaos and order, between giving and receiving, between being inside a system and outside of it. In this way I am also motivated to use art as a way to better understand my stake in the overlapping institutions of motherhood, public education and social services. The physical materials and social dialogue of daily life provide a starting place and a chance to make new meaning of my world.
VCFA MFA W12
PAUL BENAVIDEZ
VCFA MFA W12
MARGARET CARSELLO CHIAPPETTA
UNEQUAL WEALTH DISTRIBUTION UWD Discussion Group Mandala as viewed through filter Colored plastic clothing hangers Dimension varies
M - 3 TRANSFORMATION Acrylic and urethane, pigment dispersions, Sharpie over canvas 117” x 77” 2010
1000 POUND CAKES, 2011
When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived. – Henry David Thoreau My studio and social practices are driven by ontological questions: What is existence? How much can we know? How should we behave? During my studies at VCFA I began a social project that asks people an ethical question: “Why is there unequal wealth distribution-UWD and why aren’t people asking why?” During this process it became clear to me that civilization exists in a vertical obstructionist paradigm, which is antithetical to an evolutionary theory that proposes evolution selected humans for a synergistic, egalitarian and cooperative model. Anthropological and archeological evidence support this theory. I encapsulate these questions in my artwork as a multidisciplinary artist.
BROWN SUGAR Performance, 2011
The word “history” comes from an ancient Greek verb meaning “to ask.” One who asks about things–about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell–is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself. – Anne Carson
VCFA MFA W12
DAWN PARSONS FELLER
The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, what kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken? - Adrienne Rich
VCFA MFA W12
NATALIE FINKELSTEIN
Ambivalently Yours is the iconic central theme of my anonymous, web-based work (located at ambivalently-yours. com) that seeks to open the lines of communication between women through a communal acknowledging of ambivalence towards fashion and socially constructed ideals of femininity. Ambivalence means simultaneously loving and hating. While these feelings can often lead to passive behavior, they don’t necessarily have to. Part of being a woman, and dare I say, a feminist, is about advocating for a woman’s right to choose; this, however, does not have to imply that there is only one choice. I believe it is more important to create one’s own choices instead of trying to fit into the ones that have been decided by a society that denies its own sexist tendencies. My choice is not to choose, but to remain in-between, creating a space where conflicting feelings are confronted and reevaluated through the sharing of anonymous ambivalent notes and stickers left in public spaces. I can’t always make up my mind, but I am boldly undecided.
VCFA MFA W12
JANETTE HAYHOE
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye. - Elizabeth Bowen
VCFA MFA W12
SUSANNE JAKLIN
The past can never be precisely located in time or space. Thus, a person is faced with the differing levels of time and space, self and other, history and memory when encountering his or her family history. Direct and postmemory are connected to and removed from each other at the same time, separated by lived experiences and events but linked through the impact on several generations.
VCFA MFA W12
CATHY JONES
VCFA MFA W12
MILDRED KENNEDY-STIRLING
STEP IN ALL THE PUDDLES… 8” X 30”, ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT, 2011
A walk is not just mechanical motion but also a space for critical thinking and creativity. I fancy myself a walker, venturing out into the world to look and share my way of seeing. The camera has always allowed me to collect my walking thoughts in images. My practice values things for narrating the geometry of my relationships. My photographs, as well as everyday items, souvenirs and interactions serve as frames that help me engage my life’s “open spaces” and areas of interest, including land use, domestic identity and social policy.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. - Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler.
Step in all the puddles in the city. - Yoko Ono, City Piece//1963.
VCFA MFA W12
JEFF ROTH
Today, I am more confident, my heart is open to hope, I have faith in myself. No, the laborious studies I work at are not useless, the road I am following is a good one, and with the help of God, I shall achieve glory, a just and a pure glory. - William A. Bouguereau
VCFA MFA W12
ELISA WIEDEMAN
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own. - Susan Sontag
VCFA MFA W12
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to everyone at the Vermont College of Fine Arts for your insight and support. Thank you to our friends and families for your love and understanding. Thank you to our class for being truly, truly, truly outrageous.
Gratitude is not, in Silvan Tomkins’s terms, an affect but a complex emotion. Complex as it is, to me it also seems one of the happiest and most self-rewarding. -Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
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