MICA's MFA in Studio Art Thesis Exhibition

Save To Your Calendar:

Outlook

|

|

Apple iCal

|

|

Monday, June 29–Saturday, July 11

Reception: Friday, July 10, 6–8 pm

Decker, Meyerhoff, and Fox 3 galleries (1303 Mount Royal Avenue); Pinkard Gallery, Bunting Center (1401 Mount Royal Avenue)

The low-residency MFA in Studio Art allows experienced artists to develop a professional body of work, a unique personal voice, and an expanded understanding of contemporary art through intensive studio practice. The program’s thesis exhibition features the work of 11 graduating artists. Many of them explore the everyday, the ordinary, the mundane; it is a theme found throughout much of the diverse work in the exhibition. Other artists investigate the “atrocity landscape,” “urban landscape,” and “human constructed landscape.”

In her installation work, Kerry Adams aims to make time visible through the use of repetitive action, exploring the way that time is spent, accumulated, remembered, and/or valued. Julie Benoit asks viewers to slow down, look at, and listen to her collection of ordinary and ignored moments. Leah Cooper iterates a unique perspective of the physical reality of both object and place to offer a fresh eye to the undiscovered “extraordinary world” of the ordinary. Salinda Deery is interested in the duality found in painting as both a cognitive and an aesthetic experience. The subjects that artist Bruce Feldman chooses to examine involve small moments of congruence, as shifting visual and audio patterns combine to suggest a more than banal occurrence.

Nicole Herbert suspends fleeting impressions of familiar objects and contexts and explores how signification can shift when the same object is represented in a variety of media. And Michael Iacovone uses the historical idea of surveying borders as a launching point for surveying spaces within defined boundaries. Jennifer Miller works both two- and three-dimensionally within the context of architecture to explore those places where human constructs intersect with things outside their sphere of influence, control, or intention. Sondra Peron’s photographic investigations ask viewers to not simply remember, but to explore our collective historical memory of atrocity of past wars that inhabits the landscape today. Kelly Valdez’s textured and multi-layered cityscapes show how she repeatedly encounters specific areas in the city and how her position and movement throughout it as an observer shift as well. Katie Walberg makes comic books and graphic novels as well as environmental gestures or installations featuring collected refuse to illuminate the relationship between practical human life in a consumerist society and the excessive levels of waste and environmental congestion that result from it.

Image credit: Nicole Herbert, Permutations: Bottles and Cup, casting slip glazed ceramic, plaster, paper, glass, wax, and mirrors, 2009.