School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “WE OBJECT,” the first of two MFA Fine Arts Department thesis exhibitions. Curated by Wallace Whitney, painter and co-founder of Canada Gallery, New York, “WE OBJECT” is comprised of work in various media by Zaza Acevedo, Jessica Bowman, Autumn-Grace Dougherty, Mark de Wilde, Eric Graham, Tina Young-Gi Han, S. Art K., Bo Kim, Pantelis Klonaris, So Na Lee, Yae Li, Cassandra Levine, Billy Ogawa, Denise Hwa-In Yoon, Minseop Yoon, Patrick Shoemaker and Chi Zhang. The second MFA Fine Arts Department thesis exhibition, “Split Ends,” will be on view February 22 - March 9, 2013 at the Visual Arts Gallery.

Exhibition curator Wallace Whitney says, “Seeing, as we do, through the atmospheric haze of mediated images, material artifice is almost an act of Nature. The object is common to all points of view, and the practice of making is perhaps the only way one can approach art as an unmediated experience. ‘WE OBJECT’ spans the wildly disparate practices of 17 emerging artists in order to reveal, at their cores, the wondrous pragmatism of an engagement with material.

“From the playful and flirtatious offerings of what could be seen as a fourth wave of feminism to resurgence in the forms and practices of modernist painting, there is a sincere quality to the work of these young artists that hints at post-post-modernism. If post-modernism is about the casting aside of the modernist ethos of ‘make it new’, these bodies of work are, as a whole, neither sentimental nor nostalgic for either modernism or post-modernism. Easily adopting and co-opting the vocabulary of both, they simply indulge in the pleasure of making with the same critical eye and casual attitude usually reserved for trying on a coat or a new set of clothes.”

The MFA Fine Arts Department offers a specialization in painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking, new media, and mixed media, while fostering an ideology of stylistic pluralism. The two-year, 60 credit degree program encourages artists students to follow a personal course of intellectual and expressive development as they experiment with diverse artistic persuasions, discovering new aspects of their creative abilities and gaining greater technical mastery.

Exhibition

We Object

SVA Chelsea Gallery

Reception