MFA Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts presents “This Too Shall Pass,” an exhibition of thesis work from its class of 2022. These six artists hailing from three continents began their studies online in the summer of 2020; some of them are meeting in-person this summer for the first time, for the concluding semester of their graduate studies. Even as they were kept physically apart, pursuing their MFAs during these strange years gave them a unique commonality of experience. Their work summons the strained body and traumatized soul by way of the strange, the queer, even the simply jovial. There is no recent experience that has not been shaped, directly or indirectly, by the pandemic. Private lives and public personae have bled together. A sense of urgency pervades our news feeds and cultural consumption. Impermanence reigns, but each passing fad cloaks itself in the fetters of eternity. This, too, shall pass.

In a somewhat counterintuitive move, these six artists scratch at the borders of the perpetual now by leaning into the chaos and impermanence rather than fighting against it. Theodora Eliezer embraces the fluctuations and possibilities of nonlinear time and queer temporalities in Memory Salon, as participants recount their memories of a future work by the artist. Lisa Lee Freeman’s large-scale artworks on paper and canvas invite viewers to get lost in turbulent, map-like imagery, disrupting the hierarchies of cartography.

The subjects of Christianne Ebel’s two series, Being Pandemic Fine and Hair, explore how individuals are shaped by and shape external reality through visual narratives. The subjects of Juliet Walzer’s pencil portraits of the artist’s high school students–melancholy yet humorously cropped—in their lonely zoom frames explore community and care in a time of alienation. India Lombardi-Bello traces meridian lines—according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, the paths through which energy moves through the body—as an intuitive exercise in the unformed and precarious territory between illness and health.

Fei Jia’s artificial womb serves no medical function—it cannot incubate life—but imagines a future in which it could and, in the meantime, encourages viewers to play with its material components. Conceived over the course of several months, it gains new resonance in the United States after the abrupt end of Roe v. Wade. An era has, startlingly, passed.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog.

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, 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.

Exhibition

This Too Shall Pass

Van Der Plas Gallery

Reception