Now showing items 1-20 of 148

    • “Romantic Painter”: MFA Thesis - Painting & Drawing

      Townsend, Eileen (2022-12)
      My exhibition, "Romantic Painter", consists of several parts: First, a large painting, made to-scale with the original "Death of Sardanapalus." Second, a series of walnut ink drawings, each abstracted from an aspect of Delacroix's painting. Third, a video appropriated from a 1980 BBC documentary/drama of Delacroix's life, called "The Restless Eye." The audio is excerpted from the original educational film and the video (20 minutes of me dressed up, role playing as Delacroix) is my own. To make this body of work, I chased painting -- a specific painting, one of the biggest and grandest I could find -- to the extent of my abilities. What I want you to know is this: I am Eugene Delacroix. I am on a Romantic quest to make the last painting, the painting that will solve painting and will end history. I am Sardanapalus. I am heartbroken. I am burning down my palace. I am a 32-year old woman living in Upstate New York. A fire happened and I survived it. History isn’t over. I am failing.
    • Adorned with rattles: meditations on indigenous sonorism, communal healing, and nature : MFA Thesis - Photography and Related Media

      Miranda-Rivadeneira, Koyoltzintli (2022-05)
      Grounded in Indigenous ontologies, Latinx anthropology and nepantla, I seek to understand the sonic and oral traditions that have populated the Americas for millennia as a way to repair, reclaim and reimagine temporalities of healing and to tell stories across time and space. I gaze at the night sky the way my ancestors did, to inquire about how to make sense of the world and ultimately connect with them and their stubborn capacity to survive within us. I re-construct pre-Columbian instruments that have been locked away in museums, reclaiming their sounds and sovereignty. Through this act, my body becomes a vessel for the most primal creative force. I perform so that we may reaffirm our connection to the earth. To adorn these instruments and to turn them into ceremonial objects, I use achiote, mango leaves, shells, tobacco string, and iridescent pigment that reminds me of the skies in the coast of Ecuador, the ancestral homelands of my ancestors who played these instruments. My work is the past and future conjugated in the present. By reclaiming we remember; by remembering we heal. I imagine how sounds and rituals can restore a subjective-geographic relation to living systems and engage with intersectional technologies that can dismantle imperialism and ecological degradation in order to tend to the earth and heal mutually.
    • Dark garden: MFA Thesis - Photography and Related Media

      Hardin, Jackson (2022-05)
      Dark Garden tells a story in images taken from my own experiences, images that communicate the murky interrelations of between people and the complex systems of life we are a part of, using art as a means of relaying these ideas and feelings telepathically to the viewer, a process ecocritical theorist Timothy Morton calls "spooky action at a distance" (Morton, 81). The images depict things I'm afraid to lose: people, places, environments, experiences, possibilities. The project describes how the body carries the anxiety associated with an uncertain climate future, and how the tension of premature grieving for imagined futures, vanishing species, and dying forests surfaces between people and their environments.
    • Bloom: MFA Thesis - Ceramics

      Wells, Avery (2022-05)
      I create expressive, colorful vessels and botanical sculptures that complicate the relationship between surface and form. Beginning with historic wallpaper patterns that evoke feminine domestic spaces, I repetitively rework motifs from these sources into illustrations and ceramic objects. I imagine these patterns being squeezed out into space through my hands, peeling themselves off the walls they originated from and taking three-dimensional form. As my work confronts the viewer in the round, I imagine it taking on a life of its own, developing a personality and vibrant agency. I feel that I am able to collaborate with my sculptures, seeking an escape from the historic standards that have been applied to women and their creative work. However, I am also seeking the joy and comfort that can be found by embracing the decorative and elements of my own femininity.
    • Slippery spaceIsI: MFA Thesis - Metal

      Coker, Funlola (2022-05)
      As an immigrant from Lagos, Nigeria, I recall our family's past in place and time, and I am drawn to construct spaces that connect me to these lost memories. Through objects, we are able to transport our minds to a specific place or time. Although this body of work is born from my personal experience, the concept of displacement, loss and longing is familiar to so many. This is the basis of my research for Slippery Spacelsl - an installation of transportive objects that consider time travel, nostalgia, and what we rebuild in our minds when loss overwhelms. The viewer is invited to walk through this constructed space and engage these abstract objects.
    • Plain sight: MFA Thesis - Sculpture

      Houssart, Emilie (2022-05)
      Colonizer legacies in the contemporary Hudson Valley landscape: addressing commerce culture in food systems and the home through absurdist interventions.
    • $P4RKL3 FiLTH CLOUD NiN3 queerness of the in between: MFA Thesis - Metal  

      Bee, Sulo (2022-05)
      Remembering the smell of a particular place, the soft touch of another, the repetition of mending a broken relationship, or the painful things that have led to the present-these are the bricks I need to lay the foundation for the self-made protective place I call $P4RKLE FiLTH CLOUD NiN3. Shrouded in the protective reimagining of identity, I explore my environment searching for street treasures and imagery in plain sight. I am a hunter and gatherer of the unresolved and forgotten. Decoding my surroundings, findings and lived experiences, I reassemble them to develop a new visual language, a space for solace reflecting the queerness of the inbetween.
    • Birds, buttons, brontosauruses, and belugas: MFA Thesis - Printmaking

      Hunt, Elizabeth (2022-05)
      I collect things that drive my curiosity; a small selection of those items inspired this body of work. Handmade and repurposed materials merge with printmaking and transform into books that invite the viewer to consider the possibility that flea market finds and lost buttons can hold a bit of joy and wonder. My curios gain new life as soft floral dinosaurs dealing with bullying, an industrious bird building a fashion empire, a desire to hoard things that might be useful, and a somewhat conflicting eBay listing.
    • Mobility blues: MFA Thesis - Painting & Drawing

      Bodnar, Mick (2022-05)
      The paintings in this project share common thematic and aesthetic threads, though each work comes from a different angle. The mark making, palette, and relative scale will announce them as being of the same hand. The variety in compositions, points of view, and focal points will allow for a stimulating juxtaposition of images - inviting a close reading from the viewer to find the common threads.
    • Mining the ocean: MFA Thesis - Metal

      Jeong, Dawoon (2022-05)
      Following an evolution of the fishing industry, my tool collections have been created as emblematic objects of human consumerism. My fabricated works draw curiosity with the refined metal objects themselves, but they also incite a sense of danger with sharp lines and points indicating that human consumerism is dangerous and harmful to the environment. My research has focused on the inevitable extinction of the voiceless sea creatures that are rapidly becoming endangered due to human activities. I examine how metals have been used in human history, how they have been wielded toward animals and the environment and I have reinterpreted these tools and weapons through the perspective of an artist. I invite the audience to explore the relationship between self, tools, and the fragile natural world, and to consider the direction in which we will make history on this planet.
    • Freezing time: ice as a metaphor to duration in performance art: MFA Thesis - Sculpture

      Dotan, Lital (2022-05)
      We are in 2022, in the Hudson Valley, NY. I have been a performance artist for over two decades now, and in my current performance work I am freezing time, metaphorically, yet also very much physically. In this text I examine phenomenological aspects in performance- I look at Bergson's idea of materiality in time, Heidegger's idea of object-at-hand (with a focus on it's sound), and ideas of repetition in performance. I will also look at artists who addressed the temporality and quality of ice, as a weather art movement beginning in the Fluxus well into contemporary examples. The questions that inspire this research are trifold, as an open letter to performance and it's addressees: Can time as duration be made visible, for example: ice?; What infrastructure(s) can support time-based performance, for example: mold making?; Can a performance archive be a process-based mechanism, for example: buckets?
    • Displacement and emplacement: MFA Thesis - Painting & Drawing

      Rivas, Gregg (2022-05)
      My work explores the experiences of immigration, geographical displacement, uprootedness, and acculturation through abstraction. My production is influenced by surrealist automatism where I suppress conscious control over the making process, allowing my unconscious mind to have greater dominance than logical, figurative control. Thus, my creative process captures the simplicity of objects, shapes, and landscapes using texture, dimensionality, and movement that do not attempt to represent a specific depiction of a visual reality, but that altogether evoke curiosity and wondering in the viewers where they assign basic meanings and interpretations to what is observed.
    • Internal bodies: MFA Thesis - Painting & Drawing

      Synnett, Amber (2022-05)
      Anatomy, infections, surgery, and healing are the subjects of this work. From exposure to the treatment room of my mother's veterinary practice, I have seen two sides of bodily trauma: injury and recovery. I translate trauma into healing through painting, drawing, printmaking, and digital manipulation. The works are interior theaters of bulbous and carnal-looking forms, at times uncannily familiar. I expose the internal dynamics of the body to encourage viewers to reflect on their own relationship to physical trauma.
    • Reflecting: MFA Thesis - Painting & Drawing

      Robibero, Nicki (2022-05)
      As my work addresses my history of chronic illness and how it led to me becoming an athlete, I am also exploring the depictions of chronic illness in art. I look at other artists who suffer from illness and how they represent or depict their illness in their work. Every experience with a chronic illness is unique to the individual. Some painters are impacted in ways that affect how they can create work, and others are influenced in subject matter or representation. I am using my time in grad school to not only become a fast swimmer, but to learn what it means to be an athlete. I am also unraveling my intricate journey through severe illness and how this history has impacted my painting practice, both in subject matter and the way in which I paint.
    • Foreclosed; forgotten: MFA Thesis - Painting & Drawing

      Michaud, Heather (2022-05)
      The notion of home is something that most of us take for granted-yet, it is fragile. A majority of us are one financial crisis away from losing housing. My work bears witness to the ghostly remnants of homes that Americans have been forced to abandon. With documentary photography, drawing materials and paint, I illuminate the disuse of foreclosed properties. Approaching this process through visual and physical collection, I call attention to the absence and the intimate roles of previous tenants. Created with one sole purpose- this body of work aims to provide awareness of the forgotten; the foreclosed.
    • About my world: MFA Thesis - Painting & Drawing

      Zheng, Xuewu (2022-05)
      My graduation creation is a series of drawings, the material used is charcoal pencil, I named the series of works "World". The epidemic that started in 2019 and quickly spread to the world has brought disaster to human beings. Since then, not only diseases, but also all aspects of human life have undergone tremendous changes. Everything we used to know has become unfamiliar. This is the background of my drawing works. I raise new questions about human existence and hope that people will rethink how to coexist between human beings and between human beings and nature.
    • Studio: the immersion: MFA Thesis - Ceramics

      Yang, Hee Joo (2021-12)
      I am examining ways of understanding myself through objects by focusing on giving form to invisible embodiments of states like emotions, memories, and experiences. This allows me to explore the circumstances surrounding me and ask: Where do I get inspiration from? What do I hear and feel? How do I process the memories of everything I have been through? Exploring these unshaped things in my studio work allows me to give form to my accumulated experience over time. This work synthesizes and catalogs my relationship with myself through the objectification of invisible things.
    • You can’t be first but you could be next… : MFA Thesis - Printmaking

      Reynolds, Matt (2021-08)
      My work is intended to target the hypocrisy that is found in many white suburban communities, with which I am very familiar as I have lived on Long Island NY for most of my life. Many think that because the abuse of power by the police disproportionally targets minority communities, that they shouldn’t care, or that the victims are somehow at fault. Even those who were asleep in their own homes, such as Breonna Taylor, are not safe. It is my view that we are not free until everyone is free.
    • Blue and white in oil: MFA Thesis - Ceramics

      Wang, Yage (2021-08)
      Depictions of ceramic objects in European and American oil paintings are appropriated onto porcelain forms that look like stretched canvases. I explore the relationship between east and west through re-interpretation of western artifacts based on my own projection without permission. Collectively, they are an obnoxious attempt to insert my identity into a history that had already identified and fetishized “me”. My identity retold in sculptural forms are grand, inflated, boastful, and full of insecurity.
    • Passing strangers: MFA Thesis - Painting

      Caputo, Michael (2021-06)
      Passing Strangers, after the iconic 1974 porn film by Arthur J. Bressan Jr., celebrates the desire for the male body and longing for its touch. This body of work is a collection of monochromatic figurative oil paintings, personal Polaroid photographs, and found objects.