Congratulations to Bill Cifuni, Ryan Conrad, Michel Droge, Alisha Gould, Stacy Howe, Anna Rae Landsman, Alethea Norene, Alexandra Silverthorne, and Mari Skarp!

Special thanks to our 2010 thesis viva voce external reviewers Evergon and jake moore as well as guests reviewers Barak Olins, Meghan Scribner, Julie Poitras Santos, Alison Hildreth, Peter Shellenberger, Lauren Fensterstock, and Randy Regier.

The 2010 MFA Thesis Exhibition is up through June 6th, so stop by the ICA and check it out!

The final thesis Viva Voce for all graduating students in MECA’s MFA program welcomes Lauren Fensterstock as an internal reviewer and jake moore as exernal reviewer. All students are also given the opportunity to invite a guest critic to attend.

Parterre 2008 installation view at the Bowdoin Museum College of Art

Brief Biography for Lauren Fensterstock

Lauren Fensterstock is an artist and curator based in Portland, Maine. Her work has been featured broadly across the US including recent shows at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Kohler Art Center, Portland Museum of Art, DUMBO Art Center, Boston Center for the Arts, MASS Art Gallery, and Albany Airport. Lauren holds degrees from The Parsons School of Design (BFA 1997) and SUNY New Paltz (MFA 2000). Outside the studio, Lauren is currently Interim Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art.  Recent freelance curatorial projects include AFI: Upside Down which will debut at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece in April 2009.

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Reverse Engineering 2008 installation view at the FoFA Gallery, Concordia

Artist Statement for jake moore

jake moore is an intermedia artist currently living and working in Montréal, Quebec. She teaches in the Departments of Studio as well as Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. She is the Interim Director of the University’s Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery.

My work is site installation and immersive environments informed by textile and sculptural traditions. In it, narrative has a place as referent to either literary, mythological, or other forms of social texts. The poetic is readily available as I assemble together in structured environments: common objects, culturally informed materials, and phenomena like sound, light or scent. Their affect is found in the viewer’s own associations and beliefs in relation to the objects as well as in the objects’ relation to one another. Thus, the western desire to structure narrative and to perceive image as text is played out. The work is about you. And me. And the space between us, with our thoughts as presence mediated by the object, and the objects serving as points of stillness, or, as locations of arrival and departure simultaneously.

My belief that we interpret the world through our sensorial capabilities and that those capabilities are limited has lead to an invested consideration of materiality as a communication technology. In my world, all media are viewed as an expansion of the sensorium and each have infinite potential as sites of exchange. It is our limited abilities as homo sapiens that have structured our relation to the world. Culturally, westerners have chosen a relativist path as one of superiority with “man as the measure.” I am suggesting that while the relativist reading is understandable, by nature of how our bodies function and have been culturally determined, that it needs radical revision. We are limited capability transceivers that send and receive information in the forms of emotion, gesture, and language. We humans are a means of measure, but of our capabilities alone.