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Cornell MFA Thesis Show 2020

August 1 – 31, 2020

Multimedia abstract collage

Alexis White
In The Courtyard, 2019
Multimedia collage
48 x 36 inches

 

Multimedia collage

Alexis White 
After, 2020
Multimedia Collage
72 x 48 inches

 

View of clay based moldy fruit hanging on gallery wall

Grace Sachi Troxell 
Microbiome Rift, 2020
Wood fired clay, radishes and carrots, decomposing vegetables, brass wire, and a scoby
82 x 55 x 18 inches

 

Moldy fruit sculpture

Grace Sachi Troxell 
Microbiome Rift (detail), 2020
Wood fired clay, radishes and carrots, decomposing vegetables, brass wire, and a scoby
17 x 12.5 x 4.5 inches

 

Black and white minimal paper sculpture

Tina Lam
the spent dreams of volcanoes, 2020
Aluminium foil, rice paper, nylon wire
105 x 120 x 146 inches

 

Steel wire abstract sculpture

Tina Lam
arcane hyperborean breeze, 2020
Steel wire
124 x 63 x 67 inches

 

closeup of multimedia installation with space heater, sticks, and lighting

Morgan Evans-Weiler 
Untitled, 2020
Space heater, stone, moss, glass, wood, LED lights, bark, sound absorption foam, aluminum rod, cardboard, gesso, birch panel, soil, copper wire, thread
88 x 63 x 21 inches

 

Multimedia piece, featuring sticks, books, and light

Morgan Evans-Weiler 
Untitled, 2020
Glass, hardwood panel, paper, gesso, ink, packing tape, wood, copper wire, LED light, stone, copper foil, book
26 x 32 inches

 

digital comic of anthropomorphic weed

Yasmeen Abedifard 
Weeds, 2020
Digital
8.5 x 11 inches

 

Digital comic, featuring plants growing

Yasmeen Abedifard 
Weeds, 2020
Digital
8.5 x 11 inches

Oil painting invoking Tulsa bombing

Kirk Henriques 
Oklahoma Negro, 2020
Oil paint on wood panel
48 x 60 inches

 

Oil painting of two individuals standing by fence

Kirk Henriques
You can dream in color, 2019
Oil paint, house paint, wood chips, mix media on wood panel
48 x 48 inches

 

Minimalist black and white ink drawing

Emma Ulen-Klees
Survey Studies - #4, 2019
Ink on Watercolor Paper
9.5 x 12 inches

 

Minimalist ink watercolor, black and white

Emma Ulen-Klees
Survey Studies - #5, 2019
Ink on Watercolor Paper
9.5 x 12 inches

Projection of man laying on rock

Ege Okal 
A proposal for a shipwreck or film prop, 2019
Truck Liner, truck tires, pvc pipe, rope, foam, plaster, cement, plastic sheet, acrylic paint, cyanoptype on fabric
dimensions variable

 

Still of building from super 8 building

Ege Okal
Plaza Orders, 2020
Digital copy of Super-8 film with sound
TRT 10 minutes 
CLICK HERE TO VIEW VIDEO 

 

three sketching related to bathing

Xiaoyao Yao
His Bath (triptych), 2020
Drypoint and Aquatint on Hahnemühle
4 x 6 inches each

 

Oil painting of steam pipes in studio

Xiaoyao Yao
Studio Interior, 2020
Oil on Canvas
24 x 30 inches

 

Full view of oil on fabric landscape piece

Paloma Vianey
Los Rebosos Cuentan Historias, 2020
Oil Painting and reboso fabric
86 x 190 inches

 

Oil on fabric landscape piece

Paloma Vianey
Los Rebosos Cuentan Historias, 2020
Oil Painting and reboso fabric
86 x 190 inches

Multicolored abstract piece, with large black shapes

Patrick Brennan
Voyage of Life, 2019
Acrylic and Flashe on canvas 
86 x 48 inches

 

Multicolored window pane

Patrick Brennan 
Burning Down the House, 2019 – 20 
Spray paint on wood stretcher frame 
48 x 36 inches

 

Black wax sculptural disk

Ciara Stack
Unwalled Fugue, 2020
Wax
27 x 27 x 3 inches

 

excerpt from Ciara Stack video

Ciara Stack
Aerial Root, 2020
Digital Video with sound
7 min 49 sec.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW VIDEO 

 

Press Release

Art that rises to meet its moment is rare, and shifting moments are difficult to describe. The Cornell University MFA class of 2020, who I worked with as a mentor last fall, converges for its thesis exhibition with a wish to reflect and deflect existing histories while asserting fresh ideas. Never abandoning material tactility, these artists are socially conscious and content driven but also object makers. To that end, much of their work is topical, or leans so—interrogating and embracing culturally relevant themes as well as personal attachments to both form and medium. 

In the large-scale works of Alexis White, discarded plastic bags are heated into malleability, flattened, and then reformed into unexpected substrates. Subverting the language of canonized abstraction, White’s objects are unlikely “paintings” as they recast throwaway fragments as organic, natural-seeming, tableaus. The mixed media works of Grace Sachi Troxell also center one material—in this case, clay—as the ancient storyteller in a contemporary tale of ritual, waste, and decay. By juxtaposing the high crafts of casting and firing against the intimacy of wrapping and encasing, Troxell’s objects are at once familiar and otherworldly; historically observant and wholly irreverent. 

Tina Lam’s geomorphic constructions, while reminiscent of systems found in nature, are completely invented—as if one’s mind’s eye were to draw in space. Transforming industrial materials, Lam extracts minimal forms from the chaos of memory, meditation from agitation. Morgan Evans-Weiler’s works share an interest in line as a content carrier. In his sculptures and installations, light bars, string, and wire act not only as physical connectors, but energy transmitters. These improvisational works are tools for seeing and unseeing, imagining and reimagining. The videos, textiles, and graphic works of Yasmeen Abedifard traverse Islamicate history and iconography to delicately explore gender and sexuality with lyrical line work and hand-written text. Investigating an intricate personal connection via gifs and cartoons bound into graphic novels, Abedifard’s works weave together past and present, underscoring universal themes of love, loss, desire and spirituality. 

Kirk Henriques’ paintings, aptly rendered in ever-accessible house paint, examine America’s largely untold history of racially motivated violence and exclusion. Caught in moments of tender one-on-one connection, his figures communicate in densely layered passages of paint that feel distressed or peeled back to reveal their sources. Emma Ulen-Klees posits the American landscape as, from a cartographic perspective, dissected. The results are haunting, fragmented drawings and prints that re-imagine the country we thought we knew as a quasi-measurable, imperfect experiment. That tenuous local/global relationship is borne out in the works of Ege Okal, whose videos and raucous, large scale installations posit public spaces in upstate New York, Brazil and her native Turkey as settings for investigating systemic power structures, ownership, and patriarchal oppression. 

The oil paintings and etchings of Xiaoyao Yao reveal a complex and contemplative inner world. Real and imagined conflate in interior spaces where light is shined on the often ignored—a dim corner, a network of pipes, or a table of seemingly mundane objects. Conversely, Paloma Vianey Martinez uses painting as a direct instrument. When coupled with brightly hued, patterned fabric, her oil paintings highlight the myriad cultural contributions Mexico has made to the United States by way of pictorial space bordering on object—shrine-like, openly nostalgic, and forthcoming. 

Patrick Brennan’s paintings and objects are portals to a trippy, un-tethered dimension where synthetic color and organic surfaces collide, synthesize and collide again. His signature Popsicle sticks and unfussy painterly gestures jump between two- and three-dimensions, emphasizing each mark’s independence and mutability. In Brennan’s world, everything exists at once and is non-hierarchal. The works of Ciara Stack also mine the relationship of raw art materials with the so-called “real world,” which manifests anthropomorphically at times and abstract at others. Her sculptures receive cameos in her videos, a tactic that intertwines handmade objects with the fragmented prose from which they came. 

Collectively, the works of Cornell’s MFA 2020 class span themes that are personal and universal, regional and global, individual and shared. There is no evidence of an overarching style, school of thought, or hive mind. Instead, the works are refreshingly unique; custom-crafted to reflect an inexplicable moment—one that is tenuous and flawed but, ultimately, optimistic.

—Wendy White, July 2020