#sfaimfa

[sfaioffical]

Next Friday is the 2019 MFA Exhibition at San Francisco Art Institute! Fifty emerging artists will open their studios and transform SFAI—Fort Mason Campus into a large-scale gallery, theater and performance space full of multi-media installations, sculptures, contemporary art films, paintings, prints, photography, performances, and more. 

To give you a sense of what’s in store for visitors, let us introduce you to ten SFAI MFA students who will be exhibiting work May 17–27! 

Tune in next week for another preview, and don’t forget to join us to celebrate the opening of the exhibition on May 17th during the public opening, or May 16th at Vernissage for an exclusive VIP Preview! 

Ans Li 

“My paintings and installations contain bright colors as well as materials from childhood. Under a cheerful surface, my work discusses issues that I am concerned about—such as gender inequality and cultural conflict—as a Chinese woman living in the United States. I highlight the importance of interaction and multiple senses, asking the viewer to become a participant in the work by allowing their senses (sight, taste, smell, and touch) to be engaged.” 

Anthony Chao

“This work explores the relationship between the splendid beauty of the undeveloped, rural, ancient landscapes and stunning ancient architecture in 安徽 Anhui Province, China, and the brilliant artistic craft that has passed its prime in history.”

Ben Cornish

“My current body of work acts as unsure timelines of mistakes and anomalies. The tensioned narratives that governed my childhood were spoken with a certainty that could only be argued back in a kind storytelling steeped in repentance. I choose to speak in image. Bosch made paintings for the dungeons, I make images for houses that are filled with arguments and quiet anxiousness hidden for oneself from an environment built of allegory and alibi.“

Guiliana Funkhouser 

“I’m interested in meeting the Wizard, how about you? My artwork interrogates contemporary mass-media entertainment and “content delivery” platforms that promise instant connection while fragmenting reality in unprecedented ways. By presenting the darkly Babylonian aspects of weaponized narrative and social media interactions through photo and sound art installations, I hope to celebrate the people and places continually pushed to the wayside in the name of technological acceleration, economic expansion, and the siren song of paradise.“ 

Haley Toyama

“I dedicate my energy to preserving memories of the city I love. I treat my practice as one of the remaining ways to criticize the neo-imperialism of the mainland Chinese government acting under the guise of British postcolonialism in Hong Kong.“

John James Hartford V

“Through a destructive process, exhumed works are constructed of both collected material and found objects that resonate with personal traumas, memories, or appeal to the aestheticized destroyed object. My work guides the viewer's attention to the visual object’s (or icon’s) sediments of time and decay—in what I've come to describe as “post-opulence”—and aims to reveal the contemporary mimesis of twice-removed truths surrounding greater bloom and decay.“

Joshua Mintz

“Through the act of stitching fractured, yet interdependent, moments in time, my work explores themes of memory and the displacement of the human psyche experienced through the wonted events of ordinary life. Sculptural and illustrative, the miniature environment, combined with the imitative inclusion of banal objects, becomes a door to the uncanny. These cross sections, extracted from a complex story line, present the viewer with ignored moments of everyday life, frozen to invite stillness and contemplation.“ 

Katie Curry

“These works are subject to the liminal: a convergence of opposites where line becomes form, where the two-dimensional verges on the sculptural, where desire and conscious thought intersect. Forms give way to recognizable imagery in the guise of domestic goods and desert landscapes, often flirting with the figurative.“

Leigh Daniels

“Using non-archival and semi-photographic processes, time and human interaction encourage inevitable destruction. I create camera-less exposures, using both light-sensitive and natural materials such as cyanotype and turmeric or beets and sun. Welcoming the materials to flow freely, I remove myself and enable the moment I have created to live and decay naturally. I strive to bring visibility and beauty to what society and the art world deem easy to dismiss.“

Sami Cutrona

“Often revealing the subject through fragments, I am interested in the ability to maintain agency through abstraction. I utilize photo-based works as a means of reclaiming bodily autonomy and disrupting the ways in which power and meaning have been inscribed on my queer abject body. While considering the art historical canon, I seek to reject its traditions. I do not directly allude to my identity—allowing room for gender ambiguity and, ultimately, agency.“

Don’t forget to join us at SFAI’s Fort Mason Campus next week to see work by these and more brilliant contemporary artists! 

[sfartenthusiast]

Out at @fortmasoncenter? Don’t miss Gentle Dispositions @swellgallery, a group show of artworks by @sfaiofficial students Sami Cutrona @samicutrona @hensel.studio and Evan Pettiglio @mellowecho, on view through 4/10 #artatthefort #fortmason #sfai #swellgallery #sfaimfa (at Swell Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/sfartenthusiast/p/BvzkEXGg5aP/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1e8qtbfud5pcn

[johanssonprojects]

Devan Christopher Tate MFA show #sfaimfa (at The San Francisco Mint)

[sfaioffical]

SFAI’s 2019 MFA Exhibition opens this Friday at SFAI—Fort Mason Campus. Fifty emerging artists will open their studios and transform the campus into a large-scale gallery, theater and performance space full of multi-media installations, sculptures, contemporary art films, paintings, prints, photography, performances, and more.

To give you a sense of what’s in store for visitors, let us introduce you to ten SFAI MFA students who will be exhibiting work May 17–27!

Check out the first preview of student work, and don’t forget to join us to celebrate the opening of the exhibition on May 17th during the public opening, or May 16th at Vernissage for an exclusive VIP Preview!

Ben Barbour

“These pieces are inspired by a seemingly insignificant wooden cog formerly used for the production of steel machinery components utilized in the extraction of china clay. In casting the object using the very material the cog was designed to process (porcelain), and by combining contemporary technologies such as 3D digital printing with traditional slip-casting techniques, a feedback loop is created between product and tool, and between contemporary and historic industrial processes and materials.”

Arthur E. Gies

“My work explores representational figure painting as an act of deliberate seeing and observation, as well as politics in an era of constant photographic bombardment—of concentration and analysis, understanding and acknowledgment. The individuals I paint determine how they present themselves, initiating a collaborative process predicated on humanity and consent based on their conceptions of identity and body. This subverts the traditional artist/subject dichotomy.”

Kate Laster

“My work is about the people we carry with us. There is a cumulative intensity to my work as I explore tenderness and the space between people—the wordless distance and closeness defining relationships. The process of carving reveals the figure, keeping that specific intensity alive. Working either intimately or monumentally, I make work connected to the weight of the past, human migration, and the effervescent exhaustion of romantic love.”

Eliza Phelan-Harder

“I am interested in the intersection of environments. My work looks at the interaction of city, nature, and humans with the utilization of organic life, photography, and sound. As an artist, I feel the responsibility to address subject matter our society tends to neglect, including adverse environmental impacts. Creating an immersive environment, I try to provide a starting point for the viewer to begin contemplating their own landscape and what role they play within it.”

Kathryn Gardner Porter

“My work exists in the spaces between intuition and intellect, childhood hope and adult reality, the archival past and the ephemeral present. I am interested in exploiting and reclaiming historically recognizable and genericized symbols to explore emotions in a higher resolution. Through the investigation of these symbolic borders, boundaries, and metaphors, I hope to provoke internal reflection and intellectual curiosity, not didactic polarization.”

Gautama Ramesh

“I observe societal, cultural, and ecological violence deep within and far outside of commonly acknowledged spheres of consequence. By hybridizing misanthropic fiction, amoral nonlinear narratives, documentary works, and abstract handmade film, I disrupt and disfigure violence as seen within cinema. Set within fractured infrastructures of nonurban spaces, constructed with tools restricted by the socioeconomic status, time, and geography of those portrayed, these films are nonconformist artifacts, created with hardcore punk rebellion and Woody Guthrie anger.”

Sherwin Rio

“Perpetually foreign, fitting neither here nor there—I am hanging on a clothesline between two countries. Working at the intersection of cultural identities, I investigate the ways in which belonging becomes blurred. Domestic objects, items of clothing, and house-construction materials function as sculpture to reference the home space that became my Philippines in America. Using pieces of personal history as departure points, I ask: Can I ever come to know what’s foreign to me?”

Suzanne Russell

“By using clay to make objects that have no practical function and refuse conventional values of skill and beauty, my goal is to make work that negotiates the uncomfortable space of the abject body and gives ceramics a non-craft identity. I am interested in the ways in which clay can elicit and hold the emotional states and marks of the maker and how this energy can inform the meaning of the work.”

Amina Shah

“Translational Mediations. In my art practice, I situate the work within historical contexts—culling from personal history, then from wider social, political, and cultural contexts. Utilizing the history of subjects and mediums with which I work, appropriating images from mass media and from systems of knowledge production, I am questioning both what is included and excluded, what is archived and what remains ephemeral. Translation becomes a tool to dissect divisive rhetoric and a site for discursive intervention.”

Yiling Zeng

“Born and raised in the East, I’ve had a hard time fitting into a distinct culture since I moved to an unfamiliar city in the West. With film and video, I have found a way to inject my nostalgia, insecurity, perplexity, and anxiety into the characters. They act as eyes and feelers for me to investigate both acceptance and rejection between different cultures.”

Don’t forget to join us at SFAI’s Fort Mason Campus next week to see work by these and more brilliant contemporary artists!