MFA Thesis II
MFA Thesis Shows II features the work of graduating Masters of Fine Arts students from various disciplines and diverse backgrounds. The exhibition, on view in the Bakalar and Paine Galleries is a multi-media showcase that includes film, video, painting, drawing, printing, sculpture, installation, and photography. Included in this exhibition are Brian Glaser, Amy Beth Harrison, Corinne Kamiya, Jeremy Roby, Soi Shin, Noah Stout, Joey Tipton, and Olivia Vegh.
Installation: Amy Beth Harrison
Michael Cardinali photographs still-life, portraits, and landscapes that transform the everyday into miracles of light. Using a large-format camera to make color and black and white photographs, the images-cyclical, seasonal, and serendipitous-present themselves as meditations on the simple act of looking extended into the more evocative art of seeing.
Brian Glaser: As a product of shifting values and over-consumption, I am intrigued by the development of a worldview within a crumbling social structure, one that lingers in the subtle and immeasurable distance between us all. My sculptures and collages explore what has filled this void and how consumerist tendencies now mark a generation's early development. By framing the culture of advertising and packaging from a child's perspective I am investigating the occurrence of mediated experiences in youth and how vicarious living can further compound the psychological barriers of relationships and the frustrations that arise in the construction of self.
Amy Beth Harrison is creating an installation of adobe bricks, plants, fibers, stacked wood, and found objects that is an exploration of the desire for nature and spirituality in Western culture. The piece will function like a garden or park that viewers can walk through. Layers of time and process will be apparent through the use of heavily worked objects, old and new materials (i.e. clay bricks next to acrylic boxes), and in projections of a drawing mapping out nature myths.
Corinne Kamiya: I am interested in the ephemeral aspects of beauty and our quixotic attempts to save or arrest these moments. What is lost in a sculpture that is impossibly fragile and destined to collapse when it collapses? What is transformed in this deliberate process of creating something so delicate that its collapse is built in and insisting on trying to save it? And what can truly be saved? These are the questions I ask of the viewer and myself. The process has been very difficult at times and watching something that I have put so much into change and fall is simultaneously exhilarating and heartbreaking. The burden of trying to preserve these objects has led to me to deal with the objects in a variety of strategies including gift giving.
Jeremy Roby: My work focuses on the distortion and crisscrossing of memories that occur as we continually corrupt, reconstruct, and reinterpret them over time.
Soi Shin: The central theme of my artwork is the beauty of the human life cycle, and the vehicles I use to express my thoughts are seeds, which are small and insignificant at the beginning, but under proper nurturing can grow into fully developed organisms that sustain other lives. Each of my paintings represents certain aspects of human lives, which are illustrated by figures of seeds of various shapes, sizes, and colors.
Noah Stout: In the summer of 2008 I made a pilgrimage to the late Gregory Markopoulos' Temenos, an outdoor sanctuary in Greece, for viewing film. In the graduate thesis show at MassArt I will be exhibiting video work that translates my experience there.
Joey Tipton's current project involves him looking curiously at the world for relationships of unintended meaning. The result is a delightful mysterious language of his own.
Olivia Vegh: I am intrigued by boundaries, physical and cerebral, personal and general. My work describes situations in which uncomfortable, surreal, and acutely pleasurable pictures are unraveling.
Reception: Thursday, May 7 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Bakalar & Paine Galleries