This 12 months marks the 100-year anniversary of the College of Oregon Division of Artwork’s MFA diploma program, making it the second-oldest Grasp of Advantageous Arts program within the nation.
To commemorate the milestone, the 2023 MFA Exhibition returns to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Artwork on the UO campus. The 5 artists showcased within the exhibition— Lily Wai Brennan, Mary Evans, Anastasiya Gutnik, David Peña, and William Zeng — signify a various vary of media and practices, spanning eco-feminism and social follow, to speculative fiction, basic pleasure and concepts about illustration by way of the materiality of portray.
The exhibition is on view from Saturday, Could 6 to June 20. It opens with a free public reception Could 5 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
“For every of those artists, this exhibition is the fruits of three years of intensive research, together with tutorial analysis and artistic studio output, in addition to an immersion within the Division of Artwork as instructors in undergraduate programs and labs,” stated Ron Jude, director of graduate research artwork. “It’s a rigorous interval even when the world is steady, but it surely ought to be famous that this MFA cohort spent their complete first 12 months in pandemic lockdown, attending and educating their lessons remotely, whereas growing their studio practices with on-line critiques. Their perseverance and talent to beat these extraordinary circumstances and produce the totally realized work seen on this exhibition is a exceptional achievement.”
Lily Wai Brennan
Lily Wai Brennan is a craft-based interdisciplinary artist whose concern lies within the expertise of residing inside ambiguous our bodies. Impressed by popular culture, desires and meditation, Brennan interrogates themes of interrace, queerness and femme. Drawn by private narrative, her follow acts as an entry level for dialog relating to marginal id.
Her thesis is titled “How Do the Seen Cover?” and it articulates the complexities of voyeuristic experiences in marginalized people as she finds herself affected by a latest stalking incident.
Mary Evans
Mary Evans is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in experimental video and paper-mache sculpture. Evans has developed a novel visible and conceptual vocabulary that speaks to concepts of consciousness, spiritualism and interdimensional realities. Rituals of symbolic transformation are carried out as characters journey into and flirt with the void within the format of pop music movies.
Anastasiya Gutnik (high picture) is an interdisciplinary, Russian-born artist whose work incorporates strolling, storytelling and notions round place and transience. Primal supplies reminiscent of soil, salt, ash, bones and grasses change into beginning factors for her installations for his or her bodily properties, cultural that means and ecological significance.
The human and nonhuman discover connections by way of their very own gestural expressions, gravitational pulls and historic entanglements. She explores the best way individuals’s connection to the pure world and one another is influenced generationally, weaving collectively installations that contemplate distant previous and the complexities of the modern second and imagines future relational potentialities.
David Peña
David Peña is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural organizer from the border area between Tijuana and San Diego. He makes use of the vocabulary of patterns to ponder private and public occurrences and as some extent of collaboration. He seeks to attach his visible follow along with his dedication to individuals and place, exploring methods to bridge group and perceive organizing as an artwork follow.
Liminality, or transitioning throughout boundaries, has been a central focus inside his follow. He investigates the various methods individuals enter and go by way of in-between areas and the methods we’re confronted with borders, geographical, inside, tangible and summary.
William Zeng
Will Zeng makes use of portray, efficiency and object-making to discover subjectivity by way of the intersection of Asian American, masculine and queer identities. Zeng engages tensions between topic and object, sleek and pathetic, disgrace and pleasure, intimacy and distance as technique of articulating a lived expertise.
His work presently makes use of the rice rocket, a racially derogative time period that broadly describe compact Asian import automobiles modified in unhealthy style and imports racing tradition as an area for exploring the alternatives introduced by the failure of the Asian American masculine topic.
—By Debbie Williamson Smith, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Artwork
