Category — Alumni Updates

MFA Alum Alethea Norene ‘10 has an upcoming installation at chelliswilson.

The Particulars of Persistent Reverie:
an experiment in fashioning the lost and looming
chelliswilson | Portland, ME
August 6th 2010

August the sixth beginning at five o’clock in the
evening, it would be our deepest honor to share in
the delights of your company

for

Alethea Norene’s latest reconciliations with Southern apparitions

High Society Music * Tailored Clothing * City Gossip *
Gentlemen’s and Ladies’ Beverages * Scandal * Ripe Peaches

MFA alums Cori Champagne ’08 and Sandra Preston ’08 (aka The Bunny Sandwich Collective) will participate in the Maker Faire in New York City.

American Nomads Project
Maker Faire | Queens, NY
September 25th & 26th 2010

The America expansionist legacy begets a destiny of wanderlust. Envisioning America without a hunger for development requires imagining another country; yet as modern artists we often consider the ideals of pioneering from the contemporary standpoint of colonial heartache and ecological betrayal. In American Nomads the bi-coastal members of The Bunny Sandwich Collective will tackle the American ideals of the nomadic ‘Pioneering Spirit’ precisely by embracing them.

American Nomads is possible in part thanks to generous grants from the Puffin Foundation and the Money For Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

MFA Alum Tina Zagyva ’09 has a new installation at the Westcott Community Art Center.

Vessel #3
Westcott Community Art Center | Syracuse NY
July 1st – July 27th 2010

From Tina:

I am a designer of instances. I conceive and produce immersive-sculptural environments for my viewer centric practice. The 21st century has accumulated an abundance of refuse & discarded materials, in which I seek to uncover found objects hidden potentials. By gathering materials, I build structures to craft a theater of a yet-to-exist future. I have developed a post-appocalyptic narrative entitled, Themselves Has Been a Gathering. From the narrative, I have developed meditative spaces for our future human selves called Vessels. Both sculptural and interactive, the Vessels act as a garrette, or club house.  The viewer must abandon habits and learn to ‘play’ by act of crawling into the space and re-vitalizing a sense of wonder, exploration and imagination.

Three MFA Alums will participate as MECA Artists in Residence for the 2010 Season.

Quinlan Corey MFA ‘06 will be at the Stephen Pace House in Stonington, ME in June and Matt Burnett MFA ’06 will be there in August. In September, Tina Zagyva MFA ’09 will travel to Nova Scotia to Baie St Marie Artist and Family Residency at the Jenny Family Compound in New Edinburgh.

MFA Alum Reenie Charrière ‘09 is in a group show at the Soundwave ((4)) Festival.

The Illuminated Forest
Soundwave Festival | San Francisco, CA
June 6th – August 16th 2010

Featuring: Jorge Bachmann, Agnes Szelag, Ben Bracken, Alan So, Suzanne Husky, Sam Easterson, Alyce Santoro, Reenie Charrière, Vaughn Bell, Elin Øyen Vister, Jessica Resmond

In Soundwave Festival’s most ambitious presentation ever, Green Sound mounts a special month-long exhibition and performance residency at The Lab. The Illuminated Forest is an imaginary world inside the gallery walls of San Francisco’s preeminent experimental art space that features a large immersive multi-media and interactive exhibit and performance installation from the collaborative minds of Agnes Szelag, Ben Bracken, Jorge Bachmann and Alan So, and environmental artist works by Vaughn Bell, Alyce Santoro, Sam Easterson, Reenie Charrière, Suzanne Husky, Elin Øyen Vister, and Jessica Resmond.

The main installation is manufactured by projections, sensors, MAX/MSP, sound, sculptural shapes and light/shadow where visitors become its inhabitants and part of its ecosystem: their presence activates both visual and auditory sensations, and leaves an imprint on the environment long after they are gone. It demonstrates our own connection to the environment and how we are all interconnected. Our presence in the environment affects this space and is forever changed (for better and for worse) with our temporal presence. This experiential exhibit actively reminds people what we do has impact: on our own lives, on others, and the world around us, both in the present and the future. It is a human reminder of the life existing outside our urban borders, its importance, and the power it can play in our lives while raising questions about a natural world lost.

The Forest will host experiential performances by some of the most compelling local, national and international artists and musicians. Inspired sound purveyors from across the sonic spectrum will explore themes of reinvention and recycling, real and imagined natural environments and creatures, endangered species, water, environmental awareness and responsibility, plantlife/animal life, and other artist imaginations.

In various eddies around the forest, artists re-imagine a place with Suzanne Husky’s textile trees and soft rocks, Sam Easterson’s animal-borne imaging, Vaughn Bell’s moving and wall mountains, Alyce Santoro’s Sonic Fabric, Jessica Resmond’s birds nests, Reenie Charrière’s Washed Up waterfall and Elin Øyen Vister’s Soundscape Røst installation on the birds of Røst archipelago in northern Norway.

photo courtesy of Project Soundwave website.

MFA Alum Christian Farnsworth ‘09 has an installation of photographs at Verbana in South Portland, ME.

Exceeding the Frame of Single-Point Perspective; Multiperspectival Composition – Notions of Deeper Time and Our Place Within the Landscape
Verbana | South Portland, ME
through June 19th 2010

Christian’s show was also written up in the Press Herald:

While trying to find a new way to present his photography, Christian Farnsworth invented a new word: Perpendrama.

It’s a combination of perpendicular and panorama, and its definition, at least for now, goes something like this: A vertical panorama that incorporates both horizons.

Read the full article on the Press Herald website.

MFA Alum Tina Zagyva ’09  continues her Vessel project with three upcoming installations.

Vessel #3
Westcott Community Art Center | Syracuse NY
July 1st – July 27th 2010

Vessel #4
Baie Sainte-Marie Artist and Family Residency | New Edinburgh, Nova Scotia
September 11th – 30th 2010

Vessel Series + Theatrical Event
Lipe Art Park | Syracuse NY
May 19th – October 2011

Above: Vessel #2 at the Bauchhund Gallery in Berlin
photos: Tina Zagyva

About the Project:

I am a designer of instances. I conceive and produce immersive-sculptural environments for my viewer centric practice. The 21st century has accumulated an abundance of refuse & discarded materials, in which I seek to uncover found objects hidden potentials. By gathering materials, I build structures to craft a theater of a yet-to-exist future. I have developed a post-appocalyptic narrative entitled, Themselves Has Been a Gathering. From the narrative, I have developed meditative spaces for our future human selves called Vessels. Both sculptural and interactive, the Vessels act as a garrette, or club house.  The viewer must abandon habits and learn to ‘play’ by act of crawling into the space and re-vitalizing a sense of wonder, exploration and imagination.

At the Westcott Community Art Center, Vessel #3 (made from car head lights) will be on exhibit from July 1 – July 27th 2010. From September 11 -30th 2010, I will be attending the Baie Sainte-Marie Artist and Family Residency at the Jenny Family Compound in New Edinburgh, Nova Scotia. During my stay, I will complete a floating Vessel, which will return with me to Syracuse to be part of a large scale installation.  Next year, May – October 2011, there will be a public arts installation of my Vessel series at Lipe Art Park in Syracuse, NY. There will be a total of 4 Vessels encased in their own geodesic plexi-glass domes and a theatrical event during the night of the opening….it will be an event to remember!

MFA alum Michel Droge ’10 was one of 15 recent MFA graduates nationwide to receive a $15,000 grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

The annual MFA Grant Program was created in 1997 to help MFA painters and sculptors in furthering their artistic careers and to aid in the transition from academic to professional studio work upon graduation. These grants are given in recognition of artistic quality to artists chosen from a body of candidates put forth by nominators from the academic art community across the United States.

MFA Alum Elaine Angelopoulos ‘09 has a new installation exhibition at Plato’s Cave, located at Eidia House.

Protect, Preserve, Perpetuate
Plato’s Cave | Brooklyn, NY
June 9th – July 9th 2010

The fifth artist in the series, Elaine Angelopoulos, creates an in situ installation; “Protect, Preserve, Perpetuate” and unique limited edition (of the same title). She utilizes the underground space of Plato’s Cave to mimic the surrounds of a noted SOHO gallery basement office where she has worked for over twenty years.

Angelopoulos writes of her installation:

“Protect, Preserve, Perpetuate” is a summation of my every day functions on the job at a reputable art gallery in lower Manhattan. I focused on basic details that underscore the various persons and things that have traversed the gallery over time. A series of floor rubbings that unify all activities that left markings from the past. A selection of my papers; to do lists, forms, mementos, and snapshots formed into a gridded scrapbook of controlled performatives.

For the “Protect, Preserve, Perpetuate” edition of 15, Angelopoulos uses a vintage Arches watercolor paper (a gift from the studio of Hannah Wilke) to form a set of paper corners to secure an artwork that is absent.

Actions and embedded memories are traced, rubbed and repeated on paper into an enclosed menagerie that will potentially moisten in Plato’s Cave. Like memories, the ecology of time and space mutate the facts that remain.

Nicholas Schroeder reviews the 2010 Maine College of Art MFA Thesis Exhibition in The Portland Phoenix.

Thesis defense: MECA’s MFA students strut their stuff
By Nicholas Schroeder | May 26, 2010

Encompassing a broad range of themes, media, and levels of participation, each set of works in this year’s Maine College of Art exhibition by nine thesis-level Master’s of Fine Arts students achieves its own world and requires a separate toolkit to process and unpack.