“Annual Cornell M.F.A. Thesis Show” Exhibition
Gary Snyder Project Space
This event has ended.
Cornell University’s Department of Art presents its sixth annual M.F.A. Exhibition at the Gary Snyder Project Space, at 250 W 26th Street, 4th Floor, in Chelsea, New York.
In 2008 the Department of Art at Cornell instituted the annual show of work by members of its Master of Fine Arts program. Held each May, the show gives these artists an exciting opportunity to exhibit their work in New York City.
The M.F.A. art program at Cornell is a part of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. With a tradition of generous tuition support and the opportunity to engage with BFA undergraduate students, work closely with art department faculty, and earn a stipend through teaching assistantships, the Cornell University M.F.A. Art Program provides an exceptional context for interdisciplinary research and creative development.
Previous Cornell M.F.A. recipients have been awarded John Simon Guggenheim and Pollock- Krasner Foundation Fellowships, DAAD scholarships, and are represented in the collections of the MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution
For information regarding the New York City exhibition, contact Maria Brown, Admissions and Graduate Services at mbp7@cornell.edu or (607) 254-4505 or visit: http://aap.cornell.edu/mfashow
Featuring new work by:
Sophia Balagamwala
Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Sophia completed her undergraduate degree in Visual Arts and Political Science at the University of Toronto. Her works explore assemblages, spaces, and nonsense, and usually reference Karachi.
Jerry Birchfield
Jerry Birchfield was born in Cleveland, OH and earned a BFA in photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2009. He is the recipient of a 2011 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the 2009 First Agnes Gund Traveling Award, and the 2007 Maxeen J. Stone Flower ’76 Scholarship for Photography. His work has been exhibited at the Toledo Museum of Art, OH; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; and the Riffe Gallery, Columbus, OH. His work is included in the forthcoming exhibition, Realization is Better than Anticipation, at the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art as well as a solo exhibition at William Busta Gallery this fall.
José Andrée De León
Born in civil war Guatemala during the late 1980s, José Andrée De Leon is an American-raised artist whose mediums are analog photography, Super 8, 16mm film, and performance work. A graduate of Hampshire College, he worked closely with the late Robert Seydel and video artist Joan Braderman in cultivating his desired aesthetic. A recipient of the SAGE Fellowship for the 2012-2013 academic year, José’s work focuses on humanistic struggles of transnationalism, post-colonial theory, and diasporas.
Elizabeth Corkery
Much of Elizabeth Corkery’s work is informed by an ongoing fascination with representation, place and the multiple with specific regard to their relationship to print media. Her practice currently centers on large-scale installation pieces, which initiate a slippage between the conventionally two-dimensional nature of print and a more volumetric architectural space. Engaging initially with just a photograph, her explorations often begin with the two-dimensional descriptions of a location she has never visited. Approaching the site with an absence of physical experience she embarks on a process of construction, which, through the visual mediations of digital reproduction, screenprint and sculptural form, returning the images to a spatial context, as site-specific installations.
Brian Dunn
Brian Dunn’s paintings provide views of the prosaic through a lense of pictorial and material abstraction. Individual works are often comprised of multiple paintings installed in response to an architectural given. In addition to Free School, his work will be on view for the month of May in Stirred Up Still at Fjord Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.
Nick Foster
Working with architectural spaces is Nick Foster’s main point of interest. He believes that architecture holds within it latent and clear collective psychic processes, whether pathological, benign, or even meta-material. Through photography’s queer paradoxical programs, its ability to mimic spaces while always remaining Not-It, one can engage in play that ends up being an affective, albeit abstract, form of archaeology that moves in and out of an essence that literally appears, to one, and in his view much more important, another that surfaces from a non-place-able, magical, archetypal, Styx Zone. This play does not lead to a knowledge gained nor is it a means to an end, but rather it attempts a tracing of the myriad, vague, alienated, and crooked paths back to a singular same starting point.
Mariamma Kambom
Mariamma Kambon explores contemporary culture within the context of recorded history.
Her first solo show, Exposure, was held at the National Museum of Trinidad and Tobago, (2007), followed by Between the Lines, at Tobago Hilton, (2007). Her work has been published in international newspapers, magazines and advertising campaigns. In 2009, Kambon was selected as an official photographer for the Fifth Summit of the Americas, which led to an image on the front page of the New York Times.
Mariamma was awarded a Sport and Culture Grant by the Ministry of Sport and Youth Affairs (2009) and moved from the Caribbean to New York to expand her practice.
Raja’a Khalid
For her studio practice, Raja’a Khalid uses a fictitious archive as an armature through which the forgotten histories of iconic contemporary political events are revisited. In A Minor Histories Archive, documents are collected, appropriated, presented or subtly subverted to make certain implied meanings of power more explicit. Archive’s preoccupation is with minor details of East/West collisions so documents in it refer to the otherworldly ceremony and cultural propaganda of global political exchanges.
Christina Leung
Christina Leung is a sculptor who is interested in readymades, modes of fabrication, reproductions, and aberrations. Leung is a 2nd year Cornell MFA student.
Francesca Lohmann
Born in San Francisco, CA in 1986, Francesca Lohmann completed her undergraduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, majoring in printmaking. Since then she has lived and worked in the Pacific Northwest, exhibiting locally in Seattle, as well as in San Francisco, New York and Kyoto. Currently she is completing her MFA at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.
Katherine Somody
Katherine Somody is interested in ephemeral, repeated gestures: language that points elsewhere, and work that might just possibly void itself to allow for the next possibility. Lately, she’s been working a lot with balloons as a way to mark the passage of time, and all that that implies. Her minimal performative work investigates our relationship to place, to time, to self, and to each other.
Gaby Wolodarski
Gaby Wolodarski is a painter, mostly. Haunted by the premise that, personal prejudices and pragmatic facts of life notwithstanding, no one thing has more importance than any other, and that neither does any criterion fully outweigh any other, she generates paintings and paint-based installations as a means towards the lifting of the quotidian veil, or filter, which she perceives as operative on the stream of sensory and linguistic input that is experience. The idea of the basic parity of all things makes their partisanship all the more exciting. It’s an idea which compels a probing into comparisons between objects, and into the absurdities of perception (we only see the fronts of things, for example), until difference is rendered inseparable from one’s comprehension of it. To put paint to the service of this inquiry is both cynical (as today’s visual culture is faster and more mobile than paint could ever aspire to) and hopeful (that a painted image’s direct appeal may be a means to connect doubt to the tendency to believe one’s eyes).
Piotr Chizinski
Piotr earned a BFA in Sculpture/Photography from Texas Tech University and is currently completing a MFA from Cornell University in New York. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious Jacob K Javits Fellowship from the U.S Department of Education to cover the costs of his studies. Working with models, materials, drawings, and performance he explores the hidden infrastructure, both social and material, that we interact with in our daily lives. Piotr has participated in many national and international exhibitions and residencies and continues a practice that seeks to engage with the public and social real with a view to shape and transform human action and historical experience.
Media
Schedule
from May 03, 2013 to May 10, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-05-03 from 18:00 to 21:00