March 20 – May 15, 2010
Reception: April 3, 2010, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Six current Art Department MFA students are participating in this exhibition at the Riverside Art Museum.
Nathan Bockelman – 2nd Year MFA
Cameron Crone – 2nd Year MFA
David Gilbert – 2nd Year MFA
Zachary Leener – 1st Year MFA
Ryan Perez – 1st Year MFA
Matthew Shain – 1st Year MFA
These students work in various and multiple media including sculpture, painting, photography, video, performance and installation. They each approach their work with a unique voice, conceptual framework and formal sensibility. All of the students in the exhibition are actively engaged with an important lineage of artistic practice and the ever-evolving arena of contemporary art. Any attempt to make more structured ties between their work would be artificial and disingenuous.
Nathan Bockelman – “I present a series of works each proposing an exchange between the viewer and work to operate: A large steel apparatus accompanied large framed set of instructions sits idle in contemplation, a tall sculptural work spans the height of the gallery and sways in reaction to close inspection, and a interactive webpage presents a score that vicariously walks the viewer through personal performance. I am trying to play with potential in the museum space, and certain sense of embodiment through didactic instructions.”
Cameron Crone – “More and more I catch myself looking. Not looking at anything in particular, but just looking. Noticing the way light comes through a window and hits a photo in my studio, or how a particular material reflects the dirt on the ground in a way that is unfamiliar. For me this is an aspect I am interested in investigating in my art. Highlighting the subjective nature of vision, and also touching upon issues of taste and surface along the way. This can be done through something austere like a checkerboard pattern, or something more absurd like a book of Photoshop doodles. Whatever the means, however, my goal is the same, to make a work that shows the imperfections of our perceptual processes.”
David Gilbert – “Using recognizable, simple and sometime downright pathetic materials (such as cardboard, wood, fabric, plaster, and paint), I aim to create pieces that look like abstracted bodies, people, characters, body parts, or even animals. Fusing together these banal materials creates pieces where the viewer ideally both recognizes the materials for what they are but also begins to imagine the forms figuratively.
Zachary Leener – “My work exists where the suburban and the psychedelic intersect. Moving casually between sculpture, video, photography, drawing, collecting, bookmaking, performance and unique digital prints, Leener’s projects aim to describe the confusion and weirdness of our time here on earth in 2010. Taking cues both from the formal characteristics of e-bay auctions and museum displays, Leener mines our collective cultural visual language to create a space where spirituality, interior design, sex, rock’n’roll and the Internet intersect. He is the editor of the blog ‘white shoes on white rocks’ and is currently conducting research into the Grateful Dead’s 1973-74 touring PA, the Wall of Sound.”
Ryan Perez “When making this work I was attracted to the idea of making objects without having to have a reliance on metaphor or symbolism as a support for content. I was interested in making formal art objects that attempted to rely on nothing more than the basic shapes and colors in front of me as I constructed the images for the camera. I’m in no way saying that metaphor and symbolism is a wrong way of making photographs, I’m just saying that sometimes I like to make photographs out of paper.”
Matthew Shain – “As objects, photographs are static, fixed moments in time and space. But as I try to read images, they begin to slip away from me, shifting their meanings and signifiers depending on many variables – from the viewer to the known intentions of the artist, to the context pictures. Working organically and tangentially through various photo projects, I strive to create short series of pictures unified in theme. The series are then mixed together, each singular image constituting an integral part of a more overarching narrative. The images speak not only to the specifics of each other, but also to the double nature of photographs, to their static and kinetic state.”