Thesis work by the MFA Studio Art Class of 2018
Class of 2018
Caitlin Albritton
The gym is a place where everyday antics and behaviors are amplified in a stage-like environment where there is a hyperawareness of our bodies in a public space. Exploring the politics of looking through both male and female gazes, I'm interested in exemplifying the strangeness of the body, and the peculiarity of certain gym exercises and the awkward, compromising, sometimes sexual positions they put people in.
Sasha Backhaus
Sasha Backhaus grew up on a farm in southwest Iowa surrounded by machinery, crops, livestock and one competitive, ambitious, detailed-oriented family. This background fuels her interdisciplinary, conceptual art practice based in Carroll, IA. Sasha specializes in land art, installation, and sculpture. Through these mediums she explores her spatial awareness using scale and perspective. She is interested in bricolage, found and created lines, and the idea of what it means to leave one's mark behind.
Katie Morris
Without distinguishing between becoming and history, the work is an exploration of labored tinkering with utilitarian materials. Using discarded and found objects for untapped potential and unexploited energies to mirror our daily existence. With a commitment to a habitual process of noticing, documenting, contemplating and collecting, each object is embedded with a meditative quality. By presenting the work as a collection devoted to seemingly insignificant dead objects, the viewer is challenged to allow the material to transcend its intended purpose, away from the refuge of the obvious and certain towards dwelling in appreciation, care and concern for the connectedness and potential of our actions towards self and others.
Naomi Natale
How do we talk about what cannot be named?
Language is tenuous. Like memory it is unstable in its essence, contradicts itself and often collapses under its own construction. I attempt to investigate these frontiers where language breaks down, deteriorates and miscarries, working to reveal what can be learned in that process.
My work, based in metaphor, process, material, and relationships, continues to forge a conceptual passage for the viewer. A passage that is active, that is not for one to figure out but instead to enter into what is there.
Chinedu Felix Osuchukwu
My artwork is a way for me to express my views of the world and times in which we live. I paint images of life in the United States, as well as my travels to Senegal, Spain and my 'homeland' Nigeria. I want to portray on canvas the struggles and triumphs, the joys and the pains, happiness and sadness of life.
Angelina Prestel
Inspired by chaotic moments, spilled milk, run away rolls of toilet paper, sticky handprints, Angelina Prestel is an artist who is inspired by the the visceral absurdities of daily life. Originally from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Angelina graduated from Messiah College with degree in Art Education and Two-Dimensional studies. Using drawing as a way to process her daily life, Angelina uses non-traditional materials to question and reframe moments from her everyday. She is currently completing her MFA in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and teaches high school art.
Rebecca Rivas Rogers
Working from an ethos of 'making do and getting by' the precariousness of the work sets it perpetually on the verge of change or collapse. In response the three-dimensional work becomes the basis for a combination of observational and diagrammatical drawings. These drawings are another attempt to register that original shift in perception, the urban moment of delight that caught my eye and started everything in the first place.
Anna Skarbek
Through my installation of paintings and small sculptures titled “Green Room” I explore how mood, alone, is a subject. My approach to installation and painting is informed by subtle nuances found in mystery genre film and literature. In the end, the paintings do not provide explanations, but hint at suggestions and subliminal effects.
Mary Wemple
Trees. So vulnerable, easy to cut down. A loss of history, memory, shade, birds, air to breathe. Rather than be helpless, I make work to bring attention to the thoughtless destruction and hope for planting trees, a place to pause, meditate, reconnect.
Paper. So vulnerable, easy to cut and punch holes through. Out in the open, not protected behind glass or in a frame. The work could be bent or crushed easily. As a viewer, we could feel towering and powerful or hesitant and careful, not wanting to do harm. Leaving something vulnerable is a way to catch attention, a way to care.
Poetry. So vulnerable, easy to cut and edit words on the page. A place to think, a place to hide things, a place to reconnect.
