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| | Multiplex
January 15 - 30, 2010
Reception: Tuesday, January 19, 6 - 8pm
School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “Multiplex,” a thesis exhibition by students in the
MFA Fine Arts Department. The exhibition is curated by Elizabeth M. Grady.
Grady says “I have chosen to take advantage of the four-part division of the Visual Arts Gallery to create discrete mini-exhibitions within the overall the MFA thesis exhibition in the fashion of a multiplex movie theater. The metaphor of the multiplex serves to invite the audience to celebrate diversity rather than to seek a single unifying thread.”
In the first section, the art falls under the rubric De-construction and Reconstruction. Bryan Balla engages with the theme on a conceptual level using fragmentary text and images removed from their original contexts to tease out new meanings and to encourage viewers to create previously unforeseen connections. Yonatan Ullman relates to the theme in a more literal, process-oriented way, building up and peeling away layer after layer of paint as he constructs his images. Eric Lundquist creates emotionally and intellectually evocative environments from cast-off detritus and new construction. Wade Schaming also uses cast-off materials, but he involves his own body in the work, piling himself high with an array of seemingly worthless material; a series of photographs records his performances. The discarded materials he uses for his sculptures are transformed from random heaps of garbage into carefully ordered new works, bringing an order to the chaos of modern urban life.
The second section focuses on the idea of Abstracted Nature. Naoko Ito fragments tree branches and reconstructs their original order by placing the pieces in carefully arranged glass jars - joining repetition and a minimal aesthetic to the literal use of pieces of nature. She further abstracts natural imagery by projecting video through the resulting sculptural installation. Natalia Yovane makes use of the readily identifiable headgear of humans and animals, inviting viewers to examine the means by which identity and threat are determined. The horns, antlers and military helmets each have a martial function. Some act as offensive weapons and others defensive protection, but all imply the inescapable violence of the human and animal world. Hye Soon Hwang creates intricate, elegant drawings of formal complexity. More subtle in their relationship to recognizable forms, the drawings obliquely reference crystalline and mountainous forms. In the work of Le Xi, one sees an impulse that serves as a link to connect the first section of the exhibition with the second. His linear forms, white against a black background, slowly resolve into people and animals, only to slowly collapse and dissolve into abstraction once more. This link between the concrete and the abstract is reinforced by the wall drawings he makes by hand to accompany his digital video works.
In this era of economic crisis, many artists are examining the ways that market forces and consumer culture impact their lives and work. The third section of “Multiplex” addresses Consumer Culture and the Patterns of Everyday Life. Seong-eun Hong approaches the theme with two series of conceptually oriented photos that explore the value of commodities and labor and how they impact an artist's ability to produce work. Hong plays with social interactions in places as diverse as grocery stores and museums. In contrast, Colleen Ford approaches the world of manufactured goods and images in a formalist way, seeking ways to manifest the colors and textures of photos of ordinary objects and individuals as three-dimensional form, using materials found in the photos, like denim, carpeting and plastic resin. Bibi Flores’s vibrantly colored paintings reflect the impact of fashion and advertising on the visually overloaded urban environment. Turning an eye to the interaction between the human body and the market, Kevin Stahl uses brightly colored and fastidiously molded body parts to indicate the way that society engages such ideas as elective surgery and genetics. In his work the human body is seen as something capable of achieving an unnatural amalgam between the organic and the inorganic - between scientific synthesis and natural process - which runs the risk of ethical manipulation in the face of market forces.
It is a short step from the abstraction of nature and genetic modification to the work of Sean Dunstan-Halliday. In his warmly colored and highly detailed portrait-like paintings of strangely grotesque, invented birds, one finds the recombinant impulse of a scientist and an artist unified in a latter-day grotesquerie, that might just as well be at home in the 17th century. The theme of The Grotesque is also clearly at work in the delicate sculptures of Cathleen Cueto II, who revels in nature’s oddity, even as she references its cruelty. Like the lair of a giant spider, the environment she has created simultaneously suggests seduction and danger, comfort and threat. Synthesis of the natural and artificial is also at work in the sculpture of Matthew Stone. Amalgams of organic and inorganic materials and imagery, his work suggests both the growth of crystals and the mutations of wild beasts.
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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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