"MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department Thesis of 2009" Exhibition
SVA Chelsea Gallery
This event has ended.
School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “MFA Photography, Video and Related Media
Department Thesis Exhibition of 2009,” curated by faculty member Bonnie Yochelson.
“Some may mourn the fact that photography is no longer at the center of the art critical dialogue as it was 20 years ago,” Yochelson explains. “For young artists, however, the decline of theory and improvements in digital technology have brought creative freedom, which can be seen in the diverse work of this year’s graduates of the MFA Program in Photography, Video and Related Media.”
The possibilities of traditional straight photography can be seen in Sean Hanratty’s Photosynthesis and in Yiftach Belsky’s Ikonostasis. Hanratty’s hallucinatory cityscapes feature plants growing amid New York City’s high-rises and bridges. Belsky photographs people seen through windows, but by placing the images in window boxes illuminated by candles, he transforms them into small shrines.
Experienced photojournalists Scott Houston and Carlos Alvarez Montero used the MFA program to expand their horizons. In East Liverpool, Ohio, Houston explores a town devastated by economic downturn and crystal methamphetamine. In Covers, Montero studies individuals who create their identities by borrowing from and reassembling the styles of others.
Johanna Heldebro and Barbara Kalina adopt very different photographic strategies in response to profound personal experiences. In To Come Within Reach of You, Heldebro documents in book form her search for her father, who moved to Sweden two years ago. And in Displaced In Place, Kalina uses video and artifacts to reveal the loss of self that occurs when one loses a house in foreclosure.
The exhibition also includes a diverse selection of short videos. David Rapoport’s Women: 58 Portraits extends the sensibility of Garry Winogrand’s celebrated 1975 portfolio, Women Are Beautiful, to video. Appropriation is alive in Lissa Rivera’s Incantations of a Doll Collector, in which fetishistic images culled from YouTube appear on monitors set within a Victorian library. David Todd’s Still Photography comments on the demise of traditional photography by showing the slow-motion explosion of classic cameras.
The exhibition also includes work by Vanessa Bahmani, Jacqueline Bates, Cynthia Bittenfield, Jessica Bruah, Maureen Drennan, Harlan Erskine, Andrew Lucas, Annick Rosenfield, Tina Schula, John Stanley, Craig Stokle and Kirsten Kay Thoen.
There will be a screening of video projects by Gabriel Chavez, Julia Gregor, Laura Oxendine and Ben Schellpfeffer on Wednesday, June 17 from 7 - 10pm at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street.
One of the first graduate programs to incorporate digital practice, the MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media is dedicated to the creative practice of both traditional and digital lens-based arts and to the integration of new theories, contexts and techniques of these ever-evolving media. Emphasizing the expansion of the photographic vocabulary, the Department encourages students to challenge the current boundaries of their media, and to look at the ways in which design, video, hyper-media, telecommunications and other electronic components are impacting contemporary work in the field.
Media
Schedule
from June 12, 2009 to June 27, 2009
Artist(s)
Gabriel Chavez, Julia Gregor, Laura Oxendine, Ben Schellpfeffer, Scott Houston, Carlos Alvarez Montero, Johanna Heldebro, Barbara Kalina, David Rapoport, Vanessa Bahmani, Jacqueline Bates, Cynthia Bittenfield, Jessica Bruah, Maureen Drennan, Harlan Erskine, Andrew Lucas, Annick Rosenfield, Tina Schula, John Stanley, Craig Stokle, Kirsten Kay Thoen et al.