In just a few weeks I’ll be a Master of the Finest of Arts. Come see the thesis show, with my new installation Never Odd or Even
May 1 – 21, 2010
Reception: Friday, April 30, 2010, 8:00–10:00 p.m.
Sullivan Galleries
33 S. State Street, 7th floor
Gallery hours: Tues.-Sat., 11:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
Free & open to the public

Here’s the catalog text for my curated section:

“Transformations and Reflections”

Some transformations are like a scalpel or a pen, an insertion, an operation. Some are like alchemy, or like a vehicle changing gears. Some transformations are like a rockslide, and some rockslides take a thousand years, and some never happen at all. With widely varying concerns and practices, each of these artists explore the relationship of one thing to another— be it material, spatial, or psychological. The shifts in perception embedded in their work invite the viewer to take a second look, and reconsider what it is that they are actually perceiving.

Brookhart Jonquil’s work engages the physical and psychological processes of perception, playing with our expectations in order to create an uncanny oscillation between the simple and the seemingly impossible. Never Odd or Even is part of a recent body of work involving doubles and reflections. In this series, the audience is drawn back and forth between recognizing the objects as unique and as inextricably contingent to their counterparts. In Never Odd or Even, the physically disorienting angle of the room and the sharp intersection of its objects further complicate the attempt to locate this relationship between parts.

Dave Murray’s studio practice is self-reflexive, meditating on what it means to produce, the stakes inherent in the act of creation, and what can be done with the failure that goes hand-in-hand with endeavor. He works by creating scenarios whose potential for failure and transcendence exist in equal proportion. Frequently, these scenarios are based on misunderstandings of how the world works. Often times the spectacular and the underwhelming sit side by side in the images and objects that result from this experimentation. At stake is the hope that through our agency and beliefs we may transgress, if only in a minor way, the material limits of our existence, and thus re-write the rules as we go along.

Emily Hermant’s work focuses on representations that reveal the hidden meanings and patterns in communication, intimacy, and desire. She is especially intrigued by the ways in which seemingly ordinary interactions can be transformed to take on extraordinary meaning. Hermant’s sculptural installations touch on these transformations using a variety of materials, including fiber, wood, plastic, metal, and digital media. While exploring such transformations, she finds herself continually drawn to themes and modes of working in which simplicity, both in meaning and in form, serves as a basis for complex, layered work. Other recurring elements and themes in the visual and tactile forms she creates include strength and delicacy, permanence and transience, and attachment and isolation.

Tim Graham’s practice involves exploring sites of production and display and trying to find the similarities and differences between them. He is interested in how work created in a production site can be modified to adapt to its display location. Graham works across media and uses whatever material he thinks will best address the concerns of its place of display. He makes sculptures, videos, books, and works on the Internet to investigate the different strategies of different spaces.

Rachel Slotnick is interested in the place in which prose poetry and painting intersect. The synthesis of these two forms results in a more fully realized conglomerate of the landscape of memory. We don’t always remember in narrative. Sometimes images, sensations, and fictions can seem much more vivid than a factual recounting of events. Specifically, Slotnick is interested in memory loss and body deterioration, and the way our memories form intricate lies to help us cope. She is very invested in these “fictions” or inventions of the memory, in that we project falsehoods into the world around us, and in much the same way, she is projecting falsehoods onto a blank canvas as a sort of double metaphor.