Interdisciplinary Crit Schedule | Wednesday, Nov. 18th

Please see Interdisciplinary Crit groups/schedule below. 

Faculty, please also read the MFA blog posts to familiarize yourself with the artist's work prior to critique.

Eileen Sackman

I am currently working on creating urns that speaks of both historical form and current issues.  When reading Jared Diamonds book Collapse I was inspired to work with socio/political issues that may lead to the destruction of the American Empire. The surface of the urn depicts images that express issues of corrupt government, the destruction of the environment and the downfall of our societal structure. In contrast I am also creating vases that display images of people and events that unite humanity and give a glimpse of hope for the future.

Ann Julia Bratnick

My work focuses on the language of loss and disease and it explores the influence of spiritual lineage and family constellations upon that discourse.  This will be done via a series portraits done as multi-plate color photo intaglio prints.  The prints will create a space wherein portrait, texture and text emerge from the depths. 

April Warren

I use two-dimensional media to explore the human psyche through illustrative techniques.  I combine images of landscape, architecture, and common contemporary objects with abstract color fields and undefined spaces, suggesting the limits of our own perception in understanding the limitlessness of possibility and experience.  Objects take on personality where actual figures are absent in my work, and their grouping and placement explores the tension between the individual in society and specifically the relationship between the concepts of work and play.

Jennifer Bradley

How does our physical world represent our layered society?  Patterns and structures, materials and color, all provide layered information of our culture's values and histories. Through abstracting and fragmenting I rebuild this world around me as adornment. These pieces of jewelry reflect our contemporary culture where in there is more access to information and cultures, tools and materials than ever before.  I aim to make work that participates actively in what adornment today can be.

Sara Pfau

By juxtaposing solid, stable elements of bridge construction and acid etched parts, remnants of former order, I attempt to locate the aesthetic value of erosion and decay. Bridges, in the process of construction, reconstruction or demolition invites one to reconsider a bridge’s value as a functional system or as a historical relic of an economy that has passed it by. Bringing my objects back to the body, as site for memorial, intends to humanize the monumental and preserve connections to our industrial landscape.

Shazia Mirza

Reading the Art Object in Lahore

I am investigating the nature and dynamics of the act of “viewing” a visual art object in relation to my culture, especially with the non-specialist audience. Art object as agent of communication tends to have varied impact on viewers from different educational, geographic, religious and social backgrounds. Though most art has a universal relevance, some art that requires a reaction from the viewer may benefit from employing culture-specific and vernacular symbology, language and art forms. This particular strategy may provide multiple points of entry into art for common uneducated people that do not encounter art object on a regular basis.
As an MFA candidate, I am proposing a possibility to collapse explanation about art within the body of art work itself, in order to magnify the area of contact between art and viewer.

Under this set of umbrella questions I hope to initiate an alternative response from my viewer about the war on terror that USA and Al-Qaida are fighting inside my country, by providing a critique on evil acts committed on all sides.
 
My work holds relevance to the role of artist as a social critic, especially how an artistic activity commits to a small but significant change. I see myself contributing to a growing movement against local and international political injustice by rejecting exclusive attitudes in favor of an inclusive mental space.

Patricia Nelson

Our hunger for resources dictates local, national and
international policies that result in creating and
supporting social hierarchy, international conflict and
environmental issues.  Possibly nowhere is allocation of
resources more re-enforced than in our use of space and
physical surroundings.  At the core of this transmission
of resources is the ceramic insulator, facilitating
connectivity--the transmission of resources from one point
to another.  In this work, this object is revisited,
reevaluated, re-contextualized, and presented in an
installation through which the viewer can confront the
object situationally.

This work references both industrial and decorative
histories of the medium of ceramics and brings a critical
line of inquiry to address current social issues.  My
strategy is to utilize familiar objects to create
relationships that ask the viewer to look at material and
objects in a new way and challenge assumptions of value,
importance and use.

Lis Janes

Humans give meaning to land by marking and mapping. We give identity to the land by building buildings that then carry their own identity: a brownstone has different implied significance than a dormitory or a clapboard house. We give identity to a sheet of paper- We put markings on it that have significance and alert people to what has happened in the last twenty-four hours. More recently we have built computers that can tell us these things with up-to-the minute accuracy and cell phones that allow us to constantly be in touch with others. It is believed that the wireless signals from these products are causing a great and rapid disintegration of the planet: some of the scientists attempting to understand the current white-nose crisis in the bats of the Northeastern US are saying that it may be our penchant for wireless signals that is causing this illness.

For the remainder of the semester I am wrapping up my experimentations with materials (paper, printing and metal armature) and my goal for December is to have the project mapped out in a three-dimensional model. 

Shinq-Huey Tsai

Being a nonnative-speaker, I am playing with American idioms and language association in a whimsical way. I attempt to deal with the difficulty of English, and the common words  with many associations. Currently, installation works are popular, and it often relies on multiplicity and repetition, and my work is a tongue-in-cheek, parody of installation art.

The medium I did recently was watercolor on brown paper coated with gesso. The brown papers were cut into not very acute rectangle and uniform scale to show the casualness. Meanwhile, the images were painted in two different ways: naïve with extremely simple lines and shape, as well as sophisticated with detail and delicate. In addition, to strengthen the connection, I also add the text, the short sentence and repetitional words, in this work. The “Nuts” has four meanings: the first one is tree nuts, the second one is metal nuts, the third one is crazy people, and the fourth one is male sexual organ. This work appears my embarrassment and conflict that I have had met in my daily life, and reflects the difficulty that I have met in learning English. Besides the “Nuts”, the “wiener” was inspired from the similar idea. They have the three meanings: sausage, dachshund, andå the slang for penis.

My work is all about life and some specific moment that what I see and how I feel.  I think that the nature of life is painful, why making art so seriously? It's why I make art in a funny and playful way. I attempt to show my humor in my work. All I concerned about is based on my personal experience.

Kate Sanderson

My prints focus on the body.  Over time the bodies have gone from being slightly more straightforward depictions of human forms to become more fantastic, imagined and slightly grotesque creatures.  They are occasionally an amalgamation of animal and human bodies.  To create them, I use a variety of printmaking techniques, generally silkscreen or monotype, and use the matrix for the print like a stencil to repeat a single image multiple times on a single sheet of paper.  Once I have filled the sheet with this lone repeated form, I stare at the pattern that has been formed until I find the body within it.  From that point, I then paint on the print to draw this body out so that it will be instantly recognized as such.  Then I cut the remaining background away and hang it on the wall.

Kat Cappillino

Before converting to art I was a scientist. I spent many years studying microbiology and ecology.  I worked in a laboratory studying behavioral evolution; I spent summers researching diversity in wetlands.  My background in biology strongly influences my work’s content.  I am especially attracted to the micro cosmos and organisms that challenge our notion of reality.  Some organisms are so unbelievable and fantastical that they are abstract art.  I am currently studying invasive species as a metaphor for globalization and  to expose humans impact their environments.  I use mixed media collage, ink, gouache, watercolor, and acrylic on paper to create layered, interacting environments, mimicking the complexity and fragility of our natural world.

Daniel Mitchell

Power is desired to promote political ideals/beliefs. Power is determined through accumulation (how much you have of something) and control over technological advances of means to assert power. For both, the possibility of commodity is paramount. Political ideals can never be reached, so power is continually pursued.

Cozette Phillips

Taxidermy is both a material and metaphorical practice. It is not only the animal that is on display, but also attitudes. The use of taxidermy in fashion and household wares highlights both the domestication and the aestheticization of nature, which has often taken the form of the hunting trophy. My interest in trophies as ornamentation is informed by the rich history of the art of taxidermy and the notions of privilege, status, and hierarchy that can be associated with it. My work is an effort to contemplate the objectification of animals for such reasons and question human desires for signifiers of status.

Christina Strybis

This work illustrates a transition that happens within a person in terms of his identity, alluding to how he and the outsider perceive that transition and interpret it.  This is done in a traditional portrait bust style for a portrait is a strong signifier of identity placed in the open for interpretation by others.  Currently the faces depicted do not represent an actual individual but are purposefully left ambiguous to reference the broad emotions they show and the fact that these identity crises are a fairly universal occurrence.


Piece dimensions: 10x12x9 in.

Alexandra Spinney

My current work deals primarily with relationships between the absurd and sublime through the subject of animal portraiture.  I am most recently working on a series of painted bird portraits, ranging from the accustomed representations of beauty to the everyday and overlooked.  The subjects are set amidst backdrops often representative of landscapes, however they are not fully integrated into their environment, creating a tension between realism and the illusion of a spacelessness. I work with traditional use of oil mediums, glazes, and gilded and carved wood, emphasizing the history of the icon and the use of the gaze.  I am proposing an intrigue into the procurement of a fictional identity while drawing reference to imperialist portraiture, and rococo romanticism. 

Aliyah Gold

I consider myself a jeweler, but as such I am constantly searching for new and interesting ways for jewelry to interact with the body.  Jewelry is a compelling format to work in as it offers the opportunity to directly involve a viewer by the action of wearing the piece of jewelry. I try to make the wearers of my work active participants in the narratives created. By wearing a piece of my jewelry, one can engages in a power struggle between them and the creature rendered or they can become the creature by displaying its characteristics. I look for the preconceived associations we have toward specific animals and I try to subvert or exploit them. The strategic use of materials are key to my methodology. I am curious as to why when the hide is removed from an animal, the hide loses all of the meanings and symbols we prescribe to the said animal. It becomes a commodity with a sudden value determined by supply and demand. I am not trying to critique this system outright. I am more interested in creating new meanings and associations for both the material and the creature rendered.

Barbara Smith

The lost or discarded object exists in the space of the unoccupied perspective.  Once lost or rejected either consciously or unconsciously, the tossed fragment manifests unobserved yet claims a unique perspective and narrative agency.  By obsessively collecting these lost and transient moments, an analogical discourse emerges centering around these fragments in process as they are reauthored and restored.

Altered in the act of collection, the transformative shift preserves a moment where space and object intersect while simultaneously highlighting the act of looking which facilitated their collection.  Recognizable as the original lost item, these reauthored and reclaimed pieces operate in the zone of the found yet belong to no one.  Utilizing this reversal of the ephemeral as a condition, the rejected or discarded items are reconstituted and the transient moment is rendered permanent.