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| | MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department Thesis Exhibition
June 12 - 27, 2009
Reception: Tuesday, June 16, 6 - 8pm
Screening of select thesis videos:
Wednesday, June 17, 7 - 10pm, SVA Theatre
School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “MFA Photography, Video and Related Media
Department Thesis Exhibition of 2009,” curated by faculty member Bonnie Yochelson.
“Some may mourn the fact that photography is no longer at the center of the art critical dialogue as it was 20 years ago,” Yochelson explains. “For young artists, however, the decline of theory and improvements in digital technology have brought creative freedom, which can be seen in the diverse work of this year’s graduates of the MFA Program in Photography, Video and Related Media.”
The possibilities of traditional straight photography can be seen in Sean Hanratty’s Photosynthesis and in Yiftach Belsky’s Ikonostasis. Hanratty’s hallucinatory cityscapes feature plants growing amid New York City’s high-rises and bridges. Belsky photographs people seen through windows, but by placing the images in window boxes illuminated by candles, he transforms them into small shrines.
Experienced photojournalists Scott Houston and Carlos Alvarez Montero used the MFA program to expand their horizons. In East Liverpool, Ohio, Houston explores a town devastated by economic downturn and crystal methamphetamine. In Covers, Montero studies individuals who create their identities by borrowing from and reassembling the styles of others.
Johanna Heldebro and Barbara Kalina adopt very different photographic strategies in response to profound personal experiences. In To Come Within Reach of You, Heldebro documents in book form her search for her father, who moved to Sweden two years ago. And in Displaced In Place, Kalina uses video and artifacts to reveal the loss of self that occurs when one loses a house in foreclosure.
The exhibition also includes a diverse selection of short videos. David Rapoport’s Women: 58 Portraits extends the sensibility of Garry Winogrand’s celebrated 1975 portfolio, Women Are Beautiful, to video. Appropriation is alive in Lissa Rivera’s Incantations of a Doll Collector, in which fetishistic images culled from YouTube appear on monitors set within a Victorian library. David Todd’s Still Photography comments on the demise of traditional photography by showing the slow-motion explosion of classic cameras.
The exhibition also includes work by Vanessa Bahmani, Jacqueline Bates, Cynthia Bittenfield, Jessica Bruah, Maureen Drennan, Harlan Erskine, Andrew Lucas, Annick Rosenfield, Tina Schula, John Stanley, Craig Stokle and Kirsten Kay Thoen.
There will be a screening of video projects by Gabriel Chavez, Julia Gregor, Laura Oxendine and Ben Schellpfeffer on Wednesday, June 17 from 7 - 10pm at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street.
One of the first graduate programs to incorporate digital practice, the MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media is dedicated to the creative practice of both traditional and digital lens-based arts and to the integration of new theories, contexts and techniques of these ever-evolving media. Emphasizing the expansion of the photographic vocabulary, the Department encourages students to challenge the current boundaries of their media, and to look at the ways in which design, video, hyper-media, telecommunications and other electronic components are impacting contemporary work in the field.
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| | Visual Arts Gallery
601 West 26 Street, 15th floor
New York,
NY 10001
212.592.2145
The Visual Arts Gallery is SVA's premier exhibition facility. Located in Chelsea on the 15th floor of the landmark Starrett-Lehigh Building, it comprises four state of the art galleries and a large terrace with a commanding view of Lower Manhattan and the Hudson River. Staffed by six full-time professionals, Visual Arts Gallery offers select students the opportunity to exhibit and sell their work in the same environment as some of the country's leading artists--a number of whom have exhibited there as well.
Since the Visual Arts Gallery moved from 137 Wooster Street in Soho to its present location in 2004, it has exhibited works by renowned SVA alumni such as Renee Cox, Inka Essenhigh, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Lazzarini, Sol Lewitt, Vera Lutter, Elizabeth Peyton, Alexis Rockman, Collier Schorr, Lorna Simpson and Sara Sze, Works by Richard Avedon, Milton Glaser, Anish Kapoor, Stefan Sagmeister, Sebastiao Salgado have also been exhibited at the Visual Arts Gallery.
SVA students of every discipline derive great educational benefit from being able to study the work of celebrated artists, hear them speak at lectures, or even get the chance to meet them in person -- all right here at the College.
The Visual Arts Gallery is open Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and is closed Sunday and federal holidays*. The gallery is accessible by wheelchair. For more information, or to purchase student's work (the gallery takes no commission), please call 212.592.2145.
*Summer Hours: The gallery will be closed for the
Independence Day holiday weekend from Friday, July 2, 1pm through
Monday, July 5. June 4th
through August 20th, 2010, the gallery will be closing one hour earlier
on Fridays (5pm instead of 6pm).
For press inquiries, please call the Office of Communication at 212.592.2010 or email proffice@sva.edu
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