Category — Class of 2009

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 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.

MFA Alum Elaine Angelopoulos ‘09 is in a group show at A.I.R. Gallery in Dumbo.

Feeling What No Longer Is
A.I.R. Gallery | Brooklyn, NY
April 28th – May 23th 2010

Curated by Serra Sabuncuoglu
Featuring: Eleanor Antin, Elaine Angelopoulos, Doris Salcedo, Kata Mejía, Elena del Rivero, Sophia Petrides, Sophie Calle.

Feeling what no longer is begins with a moment, an experience, or a person from the past as it is reimagined in the present. The artists selected for this exhibition use memory as material and subject in their work, suggesting the interior dialogues these women have had, conversations imagined and experienced with those missing and present. The artists reference personal and cultural histories that document loss and longing, loneliness and community.

MFA Alum Elaine Angelopoulos ’09 is in a group show at Five Myles.

Mean and Sneaking
Five Myles | Brooklyn, NY
April 1st – May 2nd 2010

Curated by Vicki Sher
Featuring: Elizabeth Adams, Elaine Angelopoulos, Jenny Bevill, Laura Braciale, Mai Braun, Matt Callinan, Michael DeLucia, Jeff Field, Matthew Lusk, Drew Schiflett, B Wurtz, Amy Yao.

“Some of you, as we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath….It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live…always on the limits …a very ancient slough….”

Henry David Thoreau: Where I have Lived and What I have Lived For, Economy

“Mean and Sneaking” is taken from Thoreau about the state of living on the periphery; needing to make promises that can’t be kept, scrounging, borrowing, and removing oneself from the mores of the conventional social order. The artists in this exhibition borrow select pages from Thoreau…using what they can find at hand, at home and around to make a living and art. They are awake to the potential of found and conventionally wasted material presented by a society relatively unconcerned with its excess. To Thoreau they say “Thanks!” for validating and poeticizing life away from the rat race, the scrappy persistence and all, but “No thanks!” to the lonely and unsociable attitude. Their life on the outskirts is festive, filled with gift giving and celebration.

MFA Alums Cole Caswell ‘08 and Jessica George ’09, have an exhibition at USM’s Area Gallery in Portland, ME.

Patches Within Proximity
USM: Area Gallery | Portland, ME
March 12th – April 30th 2010

Using photographic, painterly, drawing, and design processes, Cole Caswell and Jessica George explore the dynamic shape of ecosystems within our local landscapes. Caswell states: “Using technology and mobile data I engage and record the contemporary landscape through a practice, which considers the evolution of the landscape’s conditions.”

Caswell and George each received an interdisciplinary M.F.A. from the Maine College of Art, and have been working, living, and observing on Peaks Island. Over the last few years they co-founded The Geographic Observatory. The Geographic Observatory uses systems of observation, perception, and exploration to form cross discipline perspectives on relationships between community and the landscape.

MFA Alum Tina Zagyva ‘09 has a solo exhibition at the Bauchhund Gallery in Berlin.

Themselves Has Been a Gathering: Vessel #2
Bauchhund Gallery | Berlin, Germany
February 13th – March 13th 2010

photos: Tina Zagyva