MICA MFAST 2020 Thesis Exhibitions
April 2 – May 14
Kaplan Gallery
This series of exhibitions is of the Maryland Institute College of Art’s low-residency MFA (MFAST) 2020 graduate students thesis work.
Artists in Kaplan:
anderson funk: ludic opacity
Watch anderson’s exhibition walkthrough
opacity: We are hard to see, tucked away beneath sensory perception, subject to the reign of languages carved long ago, we are not simple individual beings. Our learning impresses upon us the notion that we are distinct, discreet, progressing, knowable, consistent creatures, like the characters who populate the popular imaginary of our stories. This myth of transparency is oversimple, papering over the beautiful, unknowable, playful, joyful, surprising complex of opacity. ludic: We are playing, joking, feinting, making a dance, revealing what’s hiding, and showing. and it’s fun, let’s play.
Mary Stuart Hall: The Cartography of Presence/The Cartography of Absence
Watch Mary Stuart’s exhibition walkthrough
The map is an exclamation of presence, but one defined by what is not there. The two dimensional document is best understood as a political text, rather than a diagram of simultaneous experiences that creates the space it seeks to depict. The desire to name and measure space is predicated on a need for a space to be a thing. Our ability to construct an understanding of space requires it to be an object we can act on. Through sound, video, and photography, this installation addresses the space between here and there. The relational experience of space means it persists through time. Space is a durational encounter. In order to explore the precarious nature of that experience, the viewer’s presence creates the space of the work.
Nugent Koscienly: Tangible Nothingness
Watch Nugent’s exhibition walkthrough
I am investigating how we affect and are affected by our environment through experiences filtered through biology/physiology, psychology, technology, and material character. Our experiences within our world shape us and we then shape our world. Evidence is everywhere of the impact we make upon our ecologies and how these changes impact ourselves as social beings and our culture. Capturing moments in space and time through video, sound recording, collecting and papermaking the work explores a multimedia expression of the tangible and intangible, the space somewhere between originary and non-originary space: a binary system that I am unsure is sufficient.
Liz Miller: Ritual Cleansing
Watch Liz’s exhibition walkthrough
This exhibit includes wearable artifacts from a film titled ‘UBUNTU’. The film is a collection of 6 performers transforming spaces with significant ties to slavery or present day racism in the city of Baltimore, MD. While they perform movement in these spaces, their black bodies are adorned with wearable hair art sculptures which function as sacred objects. The use of smoke is meant to tap into the energy of the ancestors who walked there while simultaneously attempting to push forward to an emancipated future. An emancipation which comes from unlocking what’s embedded with versus the traditional pathway of seeking freedom from the colonizer. We cleanse these spaces of their tragedies and negative energies for the success of black futures everywhere.