Exhibition

School of Visual Arts presents an exhibition of work by the MFA Art Practice class of 2019. Curated by the program’s director of operations Jacquelyn Strycker, the exhibition will be on view from Friday, July 13 – Saturday, August 4, at the SVA Flatiron Gallery, 133/141 West 21st Street, New York City.

Anything could happen at any time.

In ten minutes, a losing lottery ticket could become the hull of a ship.

And then you could be forced to throw all of your worldly possessions overboard, to save yourself as it sinks.

Anything could happen at any time.

You could step through a painted time machine.

Attain a mobile American Dream.

The finite and toxic resource that is simultaneously sustaining and killing you could run out.

Anything could happen at any time.

You might look into a briefcase, see a lumberjack chopping wood, and then realize that you’ve been transformed into a log.

A person could evaporate, leaving behind only the salt of his sweat in his shoes.

Anything could happen at any time.

You could make a wish that becomes another person’s destiny.

Anything could happen at any time.

What does right mean? What thing am I doing? Where? And when?

Anything could happen at any time.

The artists in this exhibition created works that imagined and responded to the unpredictable—illness, natural disaster, economic collapse and crises. They at once contemplated both the beauty and the inauspiciousness of the Zen notion that control over our own fates is an illusion.

The featured artists are Leora Armstrong, Nicholas Bertozzi, Curtis Grynkewicz, Ezra Hubbard, Giulia Mangoni, Nicole Finley, Jason Mena, Maya Resheff and Isa Wang.

MFA Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts is a low-residency, interdisciplinary MFA program. A carefully selected, small group of candidates comes together at SVA’s New York City campus for three successive, intensive summer residency periods where they have the opportunity to work closely with established artists, designers, writers, critics and curators. Artists in the program engage in research-based practices, and are encouraged to converse and collaborate across subject matters using a combination of traditional and non-traditional media, technologies and techniques. The program aims to create a global community of artists and cultural producers who look beyond a consensus-driven approach to how we define what’s important in contemporary art.