January 16 - 31, 2009
Reception: Thursday, January 22, 6 - 8pm

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “Heterotopia,” a thesis exhibition by students in the MFA Fine Arts Department. The exhibition is curated by Why + Wherefore, an online curatorial platform co-directed by Summer Guthery, Lumi Tan, and Nicholas Weist.

The term “Heterotopia” is used by French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984) to describe spaces that have multiple layers of meaning or relationships in one place, but which exist outside a confined physical or mental space, as a kind of utopian ideal. An example of this fictive utopia is a mirror, a "real" object that influences one's own view of themselves, and can stand as a metaphor for the desired experiential relationship between artwork and viewer.

The curators explain, “As any one theme could not possibly cover the diversity in strategies and approaches to art making that any MFA class exemplifies, the concept of Heterotopia exists in the space of the thesis show, the artworks themselves, and the entire MFA experience. Coming from various geographic locations, personal experiences, and working in a variety of media and exploring notions both incredibly personal and outwardly social, the artists become microcosms of difference in a greater whole. Emerging from these necessarily divergent backgrounds, these students have existed physically together in one space, but also in the sometimes chaotic environs of New York City, shaping their work and identities for the past two years. Inherent in this group are contradictions, dualities, and individual representations of reality, producing an ideal Heterotopia, an approximation of a utopia that no one student can create alone. Foucault called for a society with many heterotopias as a way to distance itself from the ability to be repressed or ruled by one authority, and one can easily read this group of MFA students to be the same type of utopian social experiment, refusing to be aligned with any one notion in particular or report to a specific style.”

The exhibition features work by Vanessa Black, Jenn Brantley, Yuhi Hasegawa, Hai-Hsin Huang, Molaundo Jones, Kahori Kamiya, Egill Kalevi Karlsson, Hye Ryung Lee, Gregg Louis, Cameron McPherson, Jabari Owen-Bailey, Min Pang, Christina Sucgang, Theodore Zafeiropoulos, and Shai Zurim.