Cutting-edge art by seven students soon to graduate with master’s degrees in fine arts in the College of Arts and Sciences will be on April 15 through May 8 in the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The exhibition “NewCurrents in Contemporary Art: MFA 2011” will display works of photography, video, sculpture and mixed media, representing the culmination of two years of graduate study. The featured artists are Travis Donovan of Boone, Carolyn Janssen of College Park, Pa., Lydia Anne McCarthy of Woodstock, Vt., Jessye McDowell of Richmond, Ky., John Hollin Kelse Norwood of Durham, Raymond Padrón of Chattanooga, Tenn., and Tracy Spencer-Stonestreet of Greensboro and Raleigh.
“This is one of the strongest MFA classes that we’ve graduated,” said Jeff Whetstone, associate professor of art and director of graduate studies in the department, which is in the College. “The spectrum of work runs from small-scale photographs to a sculpture that’s 19 feet high, so it’s a really diverse group of voices and media.”
Blurring the boundaries between tame and wild, sensual and grotesque, attraction and repulsion, Donovan’s mixed media works take materials typically associated with clothing and present them outside normal expectations. He aims to encourage an intimate conversation between viewers and their environment by heightening awareness and problematizing notions of comfort. His art allows viewers to confront the unexpected consciously and bring greater sensitivity to their existence.
Interested in the cultural meanings and traditions surrounding textiles, Norwood uses cloth and thread to craft images that mix fashion and fine art. While he considers his work to be part of the history of embroidery and stitching that has so influenced him, he has incorporated his own style and contemporary influences – including graffiti, race and sports – to form distinctive artworks.
Janssen uses photographs of daily life to build large-scale worlds that reference video games, science fiction tableaus and damaged universes. Her fantastic, cataclysmic landscapes are populated by roaming packs of women who engage in narratives and dramas. At times calmly observing, at times appearing apprehensive, Janssen’s figures reflect on the broken, uncertain and strange environment she created for them.
McCarthy’s art revolves around an intense longing to experience a reality that is not her own. Her photographs are visions, flashes and hallucinations of past moments, rooted in a once-nagging fear that she would endure the mental illness that runs through her family tree. Using her camera lens to simultaneously mutate and beautify images, McCarthy asks both the viewer and herself: What do you at once desire and fear? How does this desire alter your perception of the world?
McDowell’s works investigate cultural codes through which people locate and define themselves and their relationships. Using video, sculpture and interactive works, she interrogates relationships between cultures and individuals and the objects and images that surround them and help form their identities. McDowell intends to take the viewer out of the passive role usually associated with filmic media. Instead, she forces images to respond directly to viewers’ actions, with the aim of questioning the mythologies by which cultures and individuals live.
Padrón examines themes of domination, obsession, mortality, sexuality and spirituality found in supposedly idyllic sculptures throughout history. The tensions he sees in idealized visions of religious, political and societal constructions force Padron to consider his own internal conflicts, which he engages in his artworks. The result is sculptures that refuse any clear message and allow the viewer to consider their complexity.
Through the manipulation of everyday household objects, Spencer-Stonestreet creates sculptures and installations that complicate entrenched conventions of family relations, sexuality and social conditioning. She is interested in the home as a site of both learned control and relational stress, and the subconscious desire to misbehave or act out. Focused on the repressive habits of middle-class America, Spencer-Stonestreet’s simple alterations of furniture reveal subconscious psychological associations of complex emotions and taboos.
The Ackland, on South Columbia Street near Franklin Street, is open Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free, with donations accepted. For more information, visit www.ackland.org or call (919) 966-5736.
