Class of 2020 Thesis Catalog

Sound Art Visual Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition

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Published on the occasion of the Class of 2020 Columbia University School of the Arts Sound Art and Visual Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery Lenfest Center for the Arts April 23– May 22, 2021 © 2021 The artists and Columbia University

Columbia University 310 Dodge Hall, MC 1806 2960 Broadway New York, NY 10027 arts.columbia.edu/visual-arts

Typefaces: Renner* Gravity

Printing: JS McCarthy

CONTENTS From the Curator

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SOUND ART Rosana Cabán

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Lauren Covey

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Julian Day

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Joan Hacker

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Lau Wai

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Paula Lycan

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Cara Lynch

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Erica Mao

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James J.A. Mercer

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Kathryn Ann Miller

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Bradley Pitts

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Stipan Tadić 112

VISUAL ARTS Aika Akhmetova

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Henry Anker

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Catalina Antonio Granados

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Roni Aviv 40 Patrick Bayly

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Eric Brittain

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Fontaine Capel

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Susan Chen

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Joanna Cortez 60 Mónica Félix 64 Baris Gokturk

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Jenn Hassin

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Yifan Jiang Clare Koury

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Kiyomi Quinn Taylor

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Meredith Pence Wilson

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Mark Yang 124 Yi Sa-Ra

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From the Dean

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From the Chair

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About the School of the Arts

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About the Sound Art Program

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About the Visual Arts Program 135 About the Curator

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Appendix 136

FROM THE CURATOR THE 2020 COLUMBIA MFA THESIS EXHIBITION

This exhibition began two years ago. Visits to the campus studios of Columbia’s Second Year MFA students in February 2020 had stirred my curiosity. I saw experimentation, satire, and the uncanny—the possibilities abounded. It was the last time I would see the work in person. A long year passed and in early 2021 I resumed my studio visits—now through the digital portal. My awe grew. Despite the distance, I was able to see all the artists at work, having set up studios or commandeered domestic space.

These propositions point to 30 worldviews. Each work is a form of condensed thinking that will unfurl over time as viewers engage, question, and counter. Organizing the exhibition was logistical, securing each project its physical requirements—whether that meant seating, overhead suspension, or a dimly lit space. The artworks’ relationship to each other is arbitrary.

Nonetheless, themes of transformation, isolation, precarity, and dislocation emerged.

Each artist took up residence in New York City, exposing their practice to the pressure and the freedom of the continent’s cultural capital. They embed their projects in research and produce with finely calibrated decisions. Although the format of the group exhibition can at times obscure the ongoingness of each artist’s investigation, pursued throughout their graduate program and the ensuing year, a collective resonance arises—a cadence of individual inquiry and imagination.

My main point is that these artists are brave. Their work can sustain me. It sustains us. In their process, you see the courage. There is never enough celebration of artists’ craft, their pleasure, the role, and the ideas.

At the risk of sounding sincere, I offer the artists advice. Follow Holland Cotter when he venerates the path of the eternal student. When we let go of the pressure to be the expert we remain open to learning and unlearning. The questions are the unexpected treasure. There often aren’t answers. Or as Darby English recently suggested, “Let yourself be where knowing isn’t going to happen.”

Artists Jenn Hassin’s cast paper works are mulched from the clothing of trauma survivors alchemically transforming the residue of violence and transgression. The “sheets” of paper are torn and hung on the wall or laid on the ground, calming islands of beauty, containable, worthy of meditation and appreciation.

Yifan Jiang’s prismatically painted animations narrate a fable of the sudden, absurd substitution of language for synchronized, haptic experience. A town’s population begins to objectify each other. Two who escape attempt connection with grave finality.

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Yifan Jiang and James J.A. Mercer collaborated on a twitchy movie following a baby’s search for the lie between two truths.

Fontaine Capel’s replica of a brownstone stoop is translucent and inflated. Its isolation in the gallery leads me to imagine a hole left where once it anchored a certain kind of neighborhood.

In Stipan Tadić’s paintings, New York City’s streets vibrate. You can fall into them, absorbing details, finding narratives, enjoying the witty renderings.

Lauren Covey’s video work is singular in its vision. A finger traces the word “lithium” in white powder spread across the backlight screen of a monitor. With resonance of snow, powder, shadow, and language the piece makes the screen’s surface a ground not a transmission.

James J.A. Mercer’s recent paintings reflect our time of quarantine. Paired with Pet paintings from 2020, they divulge fragmented suburban narratives - a bathroom counter crowded with moisturizer or a disheveled sun-streaked interior centered on an image of gloved hands caressing a bare chest.

Mónica Félix’s three-channel installation configures wigs, bottles, sea glass, images of the ocean, and a bilingual fairy tale. Watery women and a flight tracker tracing the path from San Juan to JFK underscore a fated Puerto Rican communion with the mainland.

Witchy and kitschy, Cara Lynch’s sculptures dance on choreographed Roombas. Windchime figures carry casts of the artist’s own face, hands, and feet around glassworks formed from bark, logs, and leaves.

Joanna Cortez’s patterned pyrogravure posts keep woven canvas “drawings” aloft and live surrounded by elaborately-incised ceramics. The warp and weft slows recognition of the canvas’ black and white images of a coyote nosing foliage and a weedy setting.

Baris Gokturk’s sculpture demonumentalizes the Glory of Commerce’s (also known as Progress with Mental and Physical Force) Mercury and clock face that tops Grand Central Station. Phototransfers and painting on matte gel skins echoing riots and fires flank the piece.

Roni Aviv’s installation includes hand-comped text as drawings and in a limited edition book alongside abstracted, macro-focused photographs, light and black. Intensely surfaceoriented, the details of wrinkled or translucent paper are interspersed with texts, omitted, struckthrough, copied, parsing a belated and obscure apology.

Julian Day’s hanging installation creates sound beyond the range of human hearing with reflective mylar sheets that vibrate with a frequency too low for our ears to register. Bare bulbs reflect on the panels draped from or framed by plywood stanchions.

Clare Koury’s straw-filled gabion column echoes the fire retardation material of the gallery’s

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ceiling struts. Mountain Dew syrup in rubber skirt moulding lay along the wall’s edge. Her work transforms the pedestrian, albeit industrial, into the uncanny.

Lau Wai’s intervention into films and TV portraying Chinese characters and CGI performance, confusingly and hilariously short circuits the re-presentation of bodies and tweaks the system of bodily motion capture.

In Henry Anker’s hallucinatory and celestial paintings and drawings, birds form from stars and calla lilies reproduce themselves.

Yi Sa-Ra’s first two of a trilogy of films surreptitiously document an Asian woman’s job interviews and a Korean landlady’s increasingly threatening voice messages. The characters’ solitude is studied and lush.

Catalina Antonio Granados learned stone carving in Mexico and presents tiny houses of stone and cardboard that shine from within, their shadows, and a big arrow welded by an iron worker.

Erica Mao’s monochromatic paintings conjure fantasy worlds of cinematic space with layered landscapes, lonely houses, scenes of violence and survival. The figures live out of time.

Shelters and mountainscapes reappear in ceramic works.

Aika Akhmetova’s video installation sets CRT monitors on pedestals of varying human heights.

The multichannel work individually frames her brothers as they playact a wolf pack while the artist appears and narrates on a vertically placed, flat screen monitor.

Kathryn Ann Miller’s fabric yurt and banners evoke child’s play. In video, viscous candy-colored solids and liquids are mixed and overflow in dramatically staged science experiments.

Bradley Pitts’s sculpture features an Eames chair and a bookshelf sinking or melting into a tar pit that ominously, and precariously, flows from the wall vent of the Renzo Piano-designed gallery.

Joan Hacker will commune on command. A repurposed security camera triggered by the viewer makes human connection and interaction possible in the time of social distancing.

Patrick Bayly worked with homing pigeon trainers to host a release. Projections of the event color and highlight verisimilitudinous paintings depicting a flock high above a city street and birds in rows of cages. A laptop shows the event documentation, accompanied by a handpainted handbill.

Kiyomi Quinn Taylor’s diorama sits atop wood posts, brass ornaments, and carved turtles.

Collaged with painted fabric it images a mountainous seascape and the artist embracing a jade-hued heron.

Meredith Pence Wilson’s suite of paintings on paper with inset etchings feature windows inside

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windows like a comic or a desktop. They painstakingly depict a distinctly American sensibility, celebrating and querying the nostalgic, kitsch, tokens, and symbols of a recent past.

Mark Yang’s paintings use flat color and engrossing composition to depict Asian men.

Unclothed, they wrestle one another and sometimes evolve into geometrically arranged limbs.

Playing with incongruous relational juxtaposition, Eric Brittain’s sculptures include a short cat video, a faceless bust cast in glass to make a bank, and a reinterpretation of a corporate donut store’s steam symbol.

Susan Chen’s domestic portraits of the Asian diaspora sing with vivacity. Against backgrounds of plants and windows full of detail, the otherwise unknown figures are made monumental.

Paula Lycan photographs landscape and queer and trans bodies. Bathing, swimming, beaching as couples and alone. Occasionally, the photographer’s disembodied hand or painted toes enter the frame.

Rosana Cabán’s sculpture positions two Hitachi Magic Wands over a hi-hat and a snare drum.

The vibrating sex toys lower to create a rhythm, but slowly, with all the anticipation of the objects’ encounter.

Amy Sadao March 12, 2021 Philadelphia, PA

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SOUND ART

ROSANA CABÁN I am not a sound artist.

No soy un artista de sonido As a touring musician and music producer, I learned to consider the audience experience without compromising my work and my perspective. I bring that same approach to my installations and sound sculptures.

I am not a technology fetishist.

No soy fetichista de tecnología Every aspect of an installation is a part of my work; the cables on the floor, the gaff tape, the wires, the laptop, and the max patches. I will hide them when I can, or I will expose them when there is a conceptual value in doing so.

I am not an experimental music composer.

No soy compositora de música experimental Using the human voice, synthesizers, drones, samplers, and rhythms are all part of my practice. Nurturing the echo chamber of self indulgent sound art listening sessions is not.

I am an angry dyke.

Soy una bucha encojonada I create autobiographical works that respond to both religion and the imposed heteronormative structures that define power dynamics within queer relationships. I address conservatism, performativity, and social class constructs in and around queer communities through my work as a means of disidentification and reorientation.

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On Tour: Night 16 of 22, 2020 Performance 14:55

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TOP: Find Your Joy?, 2020 Video, Animal Crossing New Horizon Gameplay Footage 03:54

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BOTTOM: Music Performance; Precog Magazine Bubble Orchestra Launch, 2020 Printed Matter St.Marks, New York, NY

This work is on loan courtesy of the estate of David, Son of Abraham, 2019 Installation, wood, found church pew, photograph, audio, video 03:16

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LAUREN COVEY Lauren Covey creates thought-provoking work in video, sound installation, and performance. Her work pulls from the public and private worlds of psychoanalysis, self-help literature, and therapy to produce enigmatic narratives using appropriated material to create a series of invented self-reflective characters. Her process of making is not dissimilar to a torrid love affair constantly occupying her mind, generating more fiction and fantasy as her mood is strung along, oscillating between ecstasy and self-doubt. Her work embodies and attempts to embrace her self-consciousness, but continues to have a stinky aura, like a repellant that makes people run towards a pony’s turd. laurencovey.com

The recording studio is an important part of my studio practice. After concocting elaborate narratives, I head there to record the audio and video content for my work.

This part is unscripted, an improvisatory experience that helps create mythological worlds meant to be understood by the public through their abstracted version.

Within the isolation booth, you can hear all the noises that you and your body create.

Sounds of pages turning, a jaw popping are all perceptible within these walls, along with awkward pauses, the inevitable mistakes, and moments when things go wrong, “Oops.”

Despite feeling safe in the studio, selfcritical tendencies arise. I politely decline

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the option to edit out embarrassing signals of vulnerability. A jaw popping, for instance, is a signal of TMJ which reveals something that happens in the night: a person grinding their teeth. This means that this person is stressed out, which means that they can’t handle modern-day life, nor can they give good head without a sacrifice. To shun people with TMJ is not a known bias, but it symbolizes imperfection and no one wants to be reminded of their own imperfections.

My inner voice has already accepted society’s invitation for censorship and it remains folded into my sense of self. My preoccupation with containment keeps my focus divided and takes me away from the present moment. My failed effort to keep these outbursts a secret, emotional leakages leave me exposed. This is my body's way of fighting against containment.

I want to eliminate my internal voice that shouts: don’t cry .. don’t cry .. don’t cry .. (sniffle) .. hold it in .. swallow... And oh it would be horrible if someone says .. are you OK? If I could, I would make crying cool and transform the negative cry baby stigma into a cry babe badge of honor.

RIGHT: How to be Confident Series, 2020 Collage with text 8" x 11" NEXT SPREAD: Lithium, 2021 Video, sound, lightbox, lithium powder Five-minute loop

JULIAN DAY Julian Day works across diverse media, from kinetic sculpture and neon scores to delegated performance and audio guides.

They have presented work at MASS MoCA, Jewish Museum, Fridman Gallery, Bang On A Can, MATA, California Pacific Triennial, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Royal Academy of Music, Asia Pacific Triennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Institute of Modern Art, Sydney Opera House and Liquid Architecture. Day has curated programs on ABC and BBC radio, published with The MIT Press and Cambridge University Press, and presented papers at Harvard, UCLA and Goldsmiths. julianday.com

My work addresses the mechanics of how we form, maintain and relinquish social bonds.

As such, it is a growing treatise about power.

I typically corral sound’s radical promiscuity to articulate spatial politics through acts of civic commoning, drawing on my background as a composer and experimental musician.

This is evident in my project Super Critical Mass in which participants co-devise interdependent sonic actions in public spaces such as libraries, parklands, and town halls. I also create work in which fetishized instruments such as vintage synthesizers draw out relational problematics, and a body of sculptures in which subsonic sound enlivens reflective suspended membranes such as mirrored acrylic and PVC.

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My MFA has prompted several new arcs.

Firstly, how power dynamics can be parsed using quasi-legal structures. In (I Want) To Be Held, thirteen LED boxes reflect 2020’s inchoate turbulence using statutes about silencing and subjectivity, referencing canonical Fluxus text scores by La Monte Young and others. In Cohort, vocalists from Western Sydney, a destination for new immigrants, are contracted separately then aligned as a choir whose harmonies accord.

Secondly, enmeshing memoir and critique within video essays and performance lectures. My video International House, for instance, entwines personal ruminations on the loss of my father with an account of Leonard Cohen’s studies at Columbia six decades earlier, whilst 25 Words Or Less is an elliptical essay delivered as ‘straight’ spoken presentation within a classical concert.

Thirdly, how we store cultural knowledge within musical artifacts, whether objects or social structures. New Silesia highlights an underexamined history of diaspora and colonialism in rural Australia. A two-channel video centers on three German-singing choirs: the formal men’s Tanunda Liedertafel; the domestic women’s group Singkreis; and the Ntaria Ladies Choir, an Indigenous choir that sings Lutheran hymns translated by missionaries into Western Arrendte.

Complementing this are newly built pipe organs and a non-hierarchical performance for members of the local community.

RIGHT: New Silesia, 2020 Two-channel video, 36:00 Photo: Sam Roberts

TOP: Assembly, 2019 Mirrored acrylic, timber Dimensions variable Image courtesy of the artist

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BOTTOM: New Silesia and The Body Is An Act, 2021 Two-channel video, 36:00 Wooden pipes, timber, plastic tubing, bellows Dimensions variable Photo: Saul Steed

RIGHT: (I Want) To Be Held, 2020 LED boxes Image courtesy of the artist

JOAN HACKER The Tips of Waves Don’t Define Us But the Moms the Cancers Dead Cats The 200 Dollar Tips Left to Cleaning Ladies Who Find Bodies Peaceful Quiet wrapp’t Death is not a Low Lying Land Where only the Impoverished Weave But a Path of Bringing of All that’s Important to the Present is and All that Bes Where do dreams go? How do we see with eyes closed? Is there a world beyond our senses?

An objective reality that exists outside perception? Or could the world be an extension of mind, like a dream, and what we name Truth an intersection of bubbles apparently congruent in perception, preconception and ideology? Is reality not utterly fluid? As ephemeral as a glittering, sunlit wave running through our fingers?

What does it mean to transduce the voice into a Collective Vision Is isolation an experience of the body or the mind?

Who’s in charge of this prison? Who’s flying this bomber? What does it mean to Win in A War Against the Self?

Join me in Space connected Thru Sun, Radio Waves + Fibrous veins coursing through the Earth Join me in a New Dream...for although it does not exist, it Appears

RIGHT: Stills from Posthumous Honor, 2020 Sound video 00:07:09

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NEXT SPREAD: Still from Posthumous Honor, 2020 Sound video 00:07:09

VISUAL ARTS

AIKA AKHMETOVA Aika Akhmetova is a New York-based artist, originally from Kazakhstan, Almaty.

Their work references indigenous Kazakh traditions and rituals, often manifesting in sculptures, videos, performances and writings. Finished pieces bring up themes of queerness, abjection, tradition, norms and violence. Akhmetova has exhibited in the US and Kazakhstan. Their work is in the Public Collection of Art of Kazakhstan. Akhmetova studied Painting at Rhode Island School of Design and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University. They currently live and work in NYC. aikaakhmetova.com Instagram: @aigerimakh

When I make my work I often start with a tradition, a tale or an established conservative way of doing “something,” anything. My references often are culturally specific to Kazakhstan and the traditions and rituals of the Jalayir tribe. I study the history of traditions and norms and reenact them in “the wrong way,” often upsetting the conservative side of the ritual. I like to make work that disrupts the normal from the inside out by reenacting the violence that norms inflict on me back onto the norms themselves. I think a lot about gender and queerness, and what it means for me to be simultaniously non-binary, queer, and Kazakh. What it means to exist in a space where you are either invisible and mute, or highly visible, loud, and a sudden victim of a violent outburst of “the normal.”

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Recently someone described my work as “a pink ribbon around a ticking time bomb,” which in a way sums up my intent with the work. I use found objects to make sculptures, videos, performances that look and feel familiar and real, but will poison the ordinary. I am interested in the overlap of rituals and how “common knowledge” can allow the viewer to see themselves in the work, either literally by having a mirror-like surface in the sculpture, or figuratively by implicating the viewer in my body while performing.

Often, I find pleasure in the violence of my work. If it’s violence that I inflict on my own body, I find it liberating, if it’s violence towards an object, it’s a channel for a peaceful outburst. In a lot of my work I like to leave traces of being in the work or using the object, making almost all of my still sculptural pieces performative through a trace.

Performance is therapeutic to me. It’s comforting to take control and refuse to, for example, perform the ritual that was once performed on me to gender me. Since a lot of my work deals with traditions, rules, and norms, naturally it also deals with the idea of growing up, childhood, what forms us, and what hurts us. The desire to stay a child forever and never shape yourself for the gender binary and the normal, to keep playing.

RIGHT: It Iryldady (Dog’s Growl), 2019 Performance with projection 00:06:00

TOP: Wolves Don’t Cry, 2021 Multichannel video installation 00:12:00

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BOTTOM: Wolves Don’t Cry, 2021 Multichannel video installation 00:12:00

Mom’s Orchard Multichannel video installation 00:03:26

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HENRY ANKER Things Like Wind Or Sneezes Seven years ago, when I was living in LA, the Hammer Museum invited four Tibetan monks to make an impermanent mandala out of colored sand. The museum protected its collection from stray granules by hosting the ceremony in the lobby’s annex, separated by a large glass wall. The monks, I read, used an especially dense sand “to limit interference by things like wind or sneezes.”

I thought about the monks’ wind for the first time this summer, during Covid. It was awe-inspiring to see how easily my life and my friends’ lives could be disintegrated, how swiftly we were scattered across the country, as if by an angry tempest. Walter Benjamin writes, “a storm is blowing from Paradise … with such violence.” And Pete Seeger sings: It blow-ed away, it blow-ed away.

My Oklahoma home blow-ed away.

Oh it’s up there in the sky, in the dust cloud rolling by, my Oklahoma home is blow-ed away.

Things like wind or sneezes. I imagined the sand blowing off the monks’ mandala—a furious rainbow flurry! It would flow on an airborne current through the galleries and cover the Great Works in a veil of colored crystals. It would blow through Lenfest Center’s glass walls, walls designed to keep the world out. It would be The People’s Sand Storm: an immense psychedelic cloud gusting across the country, sweeping away Trump, Cuomo, Bezos, Becker, and all the other pro-liars who got richer while the rest of us paid.

This is what I thought about in “selfisolation.” Just before the lockdown, I managed to carry home three small paintings from the studio. I borrowed some of Lu’s colored sand—it was soft and cool—and scattered it over the three paintings. I think it’s a good start.

hga2107@columbia.edu

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CATALINA ANTONIO GRANADOS Catalina Antonio Granados was born in Mexico City in 1990. She received her BA in Spanish Literature at UNAM and did her BFA at NYU Steinhardt. Currently she is pursuing her MFA at Columbia University. She is interested in analyzing the performance of colonial tools that the US empire uses over Latin America and its people, especially the control of time and discourse and through politics of translations in asylum applications of Latin Americans in the US, and the narratives imposed on immigrants within the courtrooms. She approaches this by trying to develop tools influenced by radical theories from Latin American pedagogues, Greek theatre, and toys.

She currently lives in Crown Heights.

The notion of an underdeveloped country means that we the citizens of these territories will always live in the past, therefore migrating to a developed empire like the USA we become time travelers that end up getting suspended when crossing the border in the different time ripples created by the empire.

Rocks as immigrants live in the same space as the citizens of the neoliberal empire but always remain in completely different timelines.

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RONI AVIV Roni Aviv (b. 1992) works with photography, text and installation to give form to a psychological space of reprocessing experiences.

photographs become a dual surface that meditates on material memory, where the world is both shrunken and expanded in its unrecognizability.

roniaviv.com When the eye was removed from the prism ­— in which all looked beautiful — ­­ the faithless pencil had left only traces on the paper melancholy to behold.

William Henry Fox Talbot, 1846

Photography, language and mark making collapse and pose questions about attention and care within the everyday; the acts of looking, noticing, touching and effecting are being examined repeatedly. In my work I circle around difficulties in comprehension and potential doubt. Within the book under standing I utilize gaps of knowledge and acts of repetition as building blocks for a slowly revealed fragmented narrative.

I trace over erasure shavings with my pencil, I photograph watermarks; the traces of an accident on a once archival photography box. I read a letter, reread it, and rewrite it.

I trace it over a light table. Under my shaky hand the words change too. In the blank gaps between the letters, all that is not said glare in its absence. The trace is both present and lacking. It points at an occured touch, its value is not conclusive. Its appearance and affect is subtle and unstable. When I photograph, I am taking a close and parallel position to my subject matter. The printed

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RIGHT: archival lines, 2021 Inkjet print, 30” x 37.5” NEXT SPREAD, LEFT: decisions, 2021 Inkjet print, 6.5” x 9" NEXT SPREAD, RIGHT: under, 2021 Inkjet print, 8” x 10"

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PATRICK BAYLY Patrick Bayly was born in 1994 in Charleston, West Virginia. He tried being many things, a doctor, dealer, drop-out, cook, etc. But, a unicorn of a man taught him how to paint, and it stuck. Bayly earned his BFA from West Virginia University in 2018, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting later that year, before moving to New York to begin his graduate studies. Bayly has exhibited at Fireplace Place Projects, East Hampton; Crush Curatorial, Amagansett; and Steve Turner, LA. He will also be exhibiting at Canepa Neri, Milan in May.

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Homing Flyers Flyer Ink on paper 16” x 12”

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loft, 2021 Oil on linen 60" x 48"

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installation sketch Ink on paper 8.5” x 11”

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ERIC BRITTAIN Eric Brittain was born in 1984 in Louisville, Kentucky. esbrittain@gmail.com

RIGHT: Study for Bust of Saint Francis, 2021 Digital markup on screenshot Variable

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TOP: Video Still from Fluffy Friends 2020, 2020 Digital video, sound 00:02:51 LEFT: Idek, 2020 Mixed media on paper 9” x 12” OPPOSITE PAGE: The Hunger Artist: #skinnylegend, 2019 Ceramic, glaze, steel 32” x 40” x 5”

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FONTAINE CAPEL Fontaine Capel (b. 1990, NYC) uses performance, video, monumental drawing, sculpture, installation, and speculative proposals to consider our present roles and to imagine our possible futures.

Capel has performed and exhibited works at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago, The Jewish Museum, and La Trienal 20/21 at the Museo del Barrio; has been an artist in residence at Residencia Corazón Argentina, ACRE, and the Chicago Artist Coalition, the Hemispheric Institute, and was a recipient of a Cuba One fellowship.

Capel is a frequent collaborator, and has founded and led several community-centered artist-run projects. She’s doing okay, all things considered.

RIGHT: In These Uncertain Times (Video Stills), April 2020 Live Zoom Performance 8 min 12 sec NEXT SPREAD: Proposal for A Monument (Two), 2020 Wood and brownstone restoration materials Two structures, 72 " x 90" x 90" each Courtesy of Socrates Sculpture Park Photo: Nick Knight

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SUSAN CHEN Susan Chen (b. 1992, Hong Kong SAR) received her MFA in Painting from Columbia University (2020) and her BA Hons from Brown University (2015). She is a 2020 Hopper Prize Winner, 2019 AXA Art Prize finalist, and her work has been featured in New American Paintings #152, #147 (Noteworthy Artist), and #141. Chen’s work was recently reviewed by The New York Times, John Yau at Hyperallergic, Artnet, Art & Object, Observer, It’s Nice That, Galerie Magazine, various art blogs and more. susanmbchen.com @susanmbchen

My current paintings respond to the lack of Asian/Asian-American representation in portraiture within modern and contemporary Western art institutions. I want to question the idea of visibility, or invisibility ­­— who is remembered in history, and who is forgotten.

Believing that figurative work has the ability to empower one’s sense of self-worth, and with Asian Americans living in a society that rarely shows their faces in everyday media, I set out to paint these portraits as efforts to help a community feel like they belong to a greater social conversation.

The sitters from my portraits are usually strangers who I find on various Asian American community social media groups on the Internet. Because I have no preconceived notions of the individuals, my interpretation of them comes directly from painting, which allows for much adventure in my creative process. Through painting, I am able to informally survey members of my community

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to better understand the psychology of race, and the varying viewpoints my sitters have on ideas of home, immigration, prejudice, identity, family, longing, love and loss.

As an American immigrant myself, my practice also allows me to further navigate my own identity as a painter who sees the world from both the lens of an ethnic majority in Asia, yet that of a minority in America. As I continue to work on this series, I continue to ask myself what it means to be an Asian female living in America: to think about assimilation and fitting into a society that still thinks of Asians under particular stereotypes. My portraits of Asian Americans allow me to continue to search for these answers – through the lens of the collective, and that of the self, which always inevitably appears through the mirror that is painting.

Yang Gang, 2020 Oil on canvas 76” x 96”

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About Face, 2020 Oil on canvas 74” x 54”

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JOANNA CORTEZ Joanna Cortez is an artist working in sculpture, ceramics, installation, and print.

She was born in Escondido, California. In 2017, she received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. They’re currently living and working in New York City.

RIGHT: Migration Pattern, 2020 Stoneware 50’’ x 31’’ NEXT SPREAD, LEFT: Three Strand Basket, 2021 Stoneware 18’’ x 9’’ NEXT SPREAD, RIGHT: Braided Ribs, 2020 Bronze 12’’ x 8’’

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MÓNICA FÉLIX Mónica Félix (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist, professional photographer and yoga instructor born and raised in Puerto Rico. She has a BA in Communications from the University of Puerto Rico, a Photography Certificate from Pratt Institute, and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. Her work is a personal narrative about the migration of one female body, specifically, the colonized, questioned, and compromised corners of this traveled life.

She continues to search for an honest identity perspective exploring the visual aspects of her experience through photography, video, installation, writing, and performance. monicafelix.com

Alláfuera (or otherwise the United States), 2021 In the deepest part of el mar Caribe, There stood a submarine Isla Visión ahogada Home to a widowed sea-man Six daughters and their Abuela Six Hermanas, six Sirenas Above all things, las Sirenas liked to gaze at the glows of luz that came from the surface from alláfuera

RIGHT: Studio installation, 2020 Photograph

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TOP: Verde Luz, 2019 Video still

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BOTTOM: Verde Luz, 2019 Video still

Siren's Song, 2019 Video still

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BARIS GOKTURK Baris Gokturk was born in Ankara, Turkey.

He was recently an ApexArt fellow in Seoul, artist-in-residence at YADDO, and a participant in SOMA Mexico as well as Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Recent museum exhibitions include Pera Museum in Istanbul and SECCA in WinstonSalem, NC. He recently completed a mural for Columbia University’s Butler Library and a commission by the Public Art Fund as part of Art on the Grid. He finished a residency at LMCC Governors Island in 2020, and his debut solo show in New York could be seen at Helena Anrather Gallery in November 2020.

Gokturk is currently working on upcoming projects in New York, Venice, and Eskisehir, Turkey. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn. barisgokturk.com

Each ideology engineers its own mythology. I am interested in the way ideology-driven aesthetics are adopted, or reacted against, by individuals as self-defining spiritual symbols.

I reconstruct two-dimensional historical documents, photographs and archival imagery about events or individuals overlooked by the mainstream history in three-dimensional layers, hybrid fragments and installations that oscillate between drawing, painting and sculpture. I rebuild the photographic image as a physical surface first and then peel it off as a displaced piece of skin that I reapply to other found or sculpted objects in relation to a specific event.

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Untitled (Fires_Riot_005), 2020 Image transfer, ink, acrylic, oil on linen 68" x 56"

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TOP: Process from the studio 01, 2020

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BOTTOM: Process from the studio, 02, 2020

Process from the studio, 03, 2020

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JENN HASSIN Jenn Hassin is a Texas-born artist and currently resides in Texas. She attended Columbia University’s Master of Fine Arts program, Class of 2020, with a focus on Social Practice and Installation. She graduated with a degree in Studio Art in 2012 from Saint Edward’s University after serving in the United States Air Force.

Hassin’s work has been exhibited at the Pentagon, a Smithsonian curated body of work, as well as in private collections at universities, in patron’s homes, and places of business. She is inspired by research and facts, which then influence her use of materials. A theme in Hassin’s current work is trauma, as well as a major focus on her personal journey about life after rape. Hassin uses found materials, such as clothing, paper, metal, ceramics and glass, that she transforms and manipulates to create a visual for her subject matter, giving the material itself a voice in her art. Hassin currently works out of her studio, where she makes layered conceptual pieces with every intention of making a difference through her art.

My work is a labor of love. I collect personal artifacts that have embedded histories of trauma. Sheets from a rape victim, prison uniforms that have been worn down or military gear that has seen more than battle, are examples of what I find in my possession.

Once I receive these objects, I have only one rule: to transform them. They become wall hangings, installations and sculptures, thus allowing the matter itself a voice in my art. I explore my beliefs around life after tragedy

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through community engagement with the intention of collectively transforming trauma.

My intention is to bring communities together to create dialogue and conversation that is meaningful enough to spark discussions, making viewers listen, ponder and become hungry for knowledge. These issues of trauma stem from sexual violence, the injustices within our justice system, physical abuse, death, our military, suicide and mental illness, to name a few.

I am inspired by transformative processes, aiming to be an alchemist, I turn these belongings of traumatic histories into a sort of gold. For example, I use military uniforms, prison uniforms or the clothing one associates with their rape, and reconstruct them into soft paper that I manipulate into large-scale installations. I use cold-hard statistics to discuss facts behind these issues in order to drive home a point, using one unit for each life represented, giving the paper a voice in which it represents. Creating beauty on a one-to-one ratio is important in my art in that it emphasizes the experience of the individual. Pretty portrait or not, I believe we each exist more honestly in our own raw materials. When I can make beauty out of these materials, these raw pieces, I find it to be the fuel to keep making.

On The Axis, 2020 Pulp painting made out of transformed clothing that has a history of trauma 36” x 36” x 1”

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Dead Horse Bay in Blue, 2020 Collected off the sand at Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn, these ceramic and glass shards are fused and transformed in the kiln 9” x 10” x 1”

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Remnants: 2, 2020 Collaged handmade paper remnants and fibers primarily made from clothing with a history that stems anywhere from violence to a celebration of life 12 " x 9"

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YIFAN JIANG Yifan was born in Tianjin, China (1994), and grew up in Vancouver, Canada.

There is something strange about walking around and being human. We use mouthy movements to talk to each other, to eat, to get to the moon, to sing, and to kill each other. Chairs are shaped like butts. There are billions and billions of butt-shaped objects across the globe.

I am a conceptually driven, project-based artist who works across painting, animation, sculpture, and performance. Drawing on strategies of pataphysics and magical realism, I construct images and narratives by weaving together personal, quotidian moments with idioms of philosophy, history, and science. Exploring the grey intersections of the scientific, the psychological, and the magical, I consider the multitude of sentiments (humility, control, wonder...) a human being has towards the world.

RIGHT: One Sunday morning, 2021 Still of 15-minute animated video NEXT SPREAD, LEFT: Caterpillar, 2018 Still of 8-min animated video NEXT SPREAD, RIGHT: 57 26, 2020 Still of 8-min animated video

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CLARE KOURY Clare Koury is an artist from Kentucky living in New York City. clarekoury.com

A structure with a bad foundation will rot from the inside out. It happens slowly, sinking and sloping gradually enough to escape detection. Entropy in slow motion doesn’t look like anything.

Over time you may notice that one side of your room is lower than the other.

Contractors call it “differential movement.”

Its effect ripples throughout the whole structure and all its attachments. Walls sigh for years in quiet expansion and contraction until finally they heave and bulge then buckle in ecstatic collapse.

Sometimes it only takes a huff and puff.

The house will find other ways to kill you.

Popcorn ceilings were a popular way for builders to hide imperfections and they almost always contain asbestos. It’s fireproof and an excellent insulator and until 1973 we all agreed that it belonged in our piping, insulation, electrical equipment, walls and floors. You’ll find it in almost any house built before 1980. You’ll find it in the telltale vinyl tiling of Columbia University buildings if you peel back enough annual layers of latex floor paint. It’s only dangerous when disturbed.

You can imagine a day in the not so distant future where you’re surrounded by skeletons

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of systems that no longer serve you, stepping over and around the vestiges of something awful in the interest of your own self preservation. The suburb is a relic of a bygone era, a problem left for urban planners to retrofit. The avenues through which your own folly and cruelty find expression and meaning are also artifacts, paved over centuries of repetition and adaptation.

Usually the choice between preservation and demolition will come down to cost.

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LAU WAI Her works utilize photography, video, drawing and installation to explore the multilateral constructions of identity in relation to race, gender and the notion of belonging. She attempts to investigate how history, fiction, and personal memory collided in the process of identity formation through personal and historical archives, cinematic imagery, popular culture and digital media.

She has exhibited in Europe, Asia, and the United States, including Kunstmuseum Brandts, Denmark (2016); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2018); Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2015, 2018); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2019, 2021); Kuandu Biennale, Taiwan (2018); EchigoTsumari Art Triennale, Japan (2015); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, United States (2019); and Yokohama Triennale, Japan (2020). Her works are collected by M+ Museum (Hong Kong); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (United States); Alexander Tutsek – Stiftung Foundation (Germany), amongst others. wai-lau.com

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TOP: I am invincible...on the screen/ False motion tracking, 2020 2-channel HD video, color, sound 03:13

BOTTOM: I am invincible...on the screen/ False motion tracking, 2020 2-channel HD video, color, sound 03:13

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TOP: Visibly Invisible (Gray), 2020 3D print with PLA 4 3/4" x 4 7/8" x 4 7/8" LEFT: Installation view

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PAULA LYCAN Paula Lycan is an artist using photography and traditional darkroom practices to create portraits of intimate relationships, tracing a broader view of partnership, family, memory, and tenderness. Paula was born in 1992 in Pensacola, FL, and grew up in San Diego, CA. She received her BA from UC Santa Cruz and her MFA in Photography at Columbia University, 2020. Paula has shown at International Print Center New York and has work in the collections at the Mead Arts Museum. She currently lives and works in NYC.

I play with your ears aimlessly because they are slightly oversized and have a subtle flop. They are the most vulnerable bits on your head. My fingernails leave their marks, traces to find my way back.

I collect images that are both documents and celebrations of these small moments of tenderness. These small victories in feeling free are the things that make us feel whole.

I photograph people that I'm close to in moments of stillness. I document the feelings that drive us: love, longing, desire, nostalgia, or a mixture of something in between. When the world feels spun into a state of entropy, this work offers some semblance of order.

Bodies exist in transitional states while landscapes blur edges of form. Time and identity are suspended in an attempt to restructure. Hierarchies and society temporarily dissolve to create space for future existences that are more fluid and malleable.

In making photographs, I always seek to have the viewer feel rather than think about what they're seeing.

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NEXT SPREAD, TOP: Jordan and Andie, 2019 Gelatin silver print 20" x 20" NEXT SPREAD, BOTTOM: Your Back, as My Poem, 2019 Gelatin silver print 20" x 20" NEXT SPREAD, RIGHT: Red Contact Sheet, 2020 Chromogenic print 8" x 10"

You Make Blue Warm, 2019 Chromogenic print 24" x 30"

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CARA LYNCH Cara Lynch (b. 1990, Long Island) is a visual artist living and working in New York. She is currently making wind chimes, suncatchers, and performative sculptures. caralynchstudio.com

I see a bad moon rising.

I see trouble on the way.

I see earthquakes and lightning.

I see bad times today.

Don't go around tonight, Well, it's bound to take your life, There's a bad moon on the rise.

I hear hurricanes a-blowin'.

I know the end is comin' soon.

I feel rivers overflowin'.

I hear the voice of rage and ruin.

Bad Moon Rising, Creedence Clearwater Revival

I've overcome the blow, I've learned to take it well I only wish my words could just convince myself That it just wasn't real but that's not the way it feels Operator, Jim Croce

RIGHT: Red Sky at Night, 2021 Installation

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LEFT: Bliss II (Meaghan), 2020 Cast aluminum, glazed porcelain, steel chain, wooden bead 32" x 8" x 6"

TOP: I’ll Be Back Someday, 2020 Video, 4 minutes, 9 seconds

BOTTOM: I’ll Be Back Someday, 2020 Video, 4 minutes, 9 seconds

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ERICA MAO Erica Mao (b.1994) is best known for her atmospheric layered paintings that stitch together disparate spaces into alternate realities. Depictions of wild, imaginative landscapes explore the feelings of fear, tension, and suspense by following the path of her characters as they weave their way in and out of the narrative. Mao has exhibited throughout the US at galleries such as Steve Turner gallery, K and P gallery, Madison Park Gallery, and IPCNY. Born in Maryland, Mao attended Parsons School of Design and received her BFA in 2016. She also received her MFA from Columbia University in 2020.

She lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens. ericamaoart.com Instagram: @erica.mao

My paintings and ceramic sculptures offer two entryways into the same world. This world envisions imaginative, inhospitable landscapes for my protagonists to wander through, searching for a place of respite, a spiritual revelation, or an understanding of their place outside of society. Exiled, my protagonists accept the only thing they have left — their images moving across the vast, hostile land where they have been shunned to.

RIGHT: Desert, 2020 Ceramic 9" x 6"

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JAMES J.A. MERCER James J.A. Mercer is a New York-based artist working in painting, drawing, and animation. He received a Bachelor’s degree from RISD, was a resident at Clocktower Productions and has exhibited at Pioneer Works and the Drawing Center. His animated videos have been featured in the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation. jamesmercer.net

My recent paintings orbit around daily life and alienation. Strict geometries are paired with domestic imagery, complicating the emotional read of a piece and creating dissonance between subject matter and abstract form.

I’m exploring framing, considering how things like windows, doors and images within images can create a point of view in an imagined place, or even in an imagined body.

I prefer to exclude full figures so that the viewer becomes the protagonist, framed by the picture they’re looking at, immersed in a scene populated by objects that are suggestive, but inconclusive by design.

Pulled closer and pushed away.

RIGHT: Today, 2020 Oil on canvas 14" x 11"

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TOP: Pets 2, 2020 Oil on canvas 23" x 23"

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BOTTOM: Still from “Two Truths and a Lie,” 2019 Collaboration with Yifan Jiang Digital Video 00:20:31

Your House, 2021 Oil on canvas 39" x 39"

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KATHRYN ANN MILLER (Born 1988. Knoxville, Tennessee) Everyday objects and household ingredients are embedded and transformed into my paintings, drawings, sculptures, largescale installations, and videos. My works are inspired by the wonder and curiosity of child-like perspective and the innate desire to create.

also illuminate imagination and desire. It is within these constructs that the potential to disrupt the cycle lies.

Some of my earliest memories include desperately stuffing objects into an Easy Bake Oven, eating Cheerios from a Centrum bottle in the darkness of the closet, and pretending strawberry-kiwiscented hairspray could cure blemishes.

My grandfather had a small furniture reupholstery business and collected porcelain dolls; great uncle wove baskets and baby bassinets; grandmother crocheted afghans and spun outworn clothes into quilts.

Growing up in East Tennessee, America, I was trained to build identity via collecting, consuming, and making. katiemiller.art @glitter_prison

FOREVER IN A PRISON OF GLITTER Inside the wasteful consumption of a commodified society lie elements of primal and cultural survival. There is a predisposition to retreat from threat and danger into an elusive universe driven by impulse and necessity. Not only is nature emulated, it is then collected, brought inside, put on a shelf, or plugged into proximity. Simple functions of manmade products bring comfort and security—but can

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Jory, 2019 Functional 4-tier water fountain inside of an Enchanted Forest in outer-space (Accessed via a portal inside of a grim windowless artist studio inside a haunted decrepit building). Materials worth mentioning: Lite Brite, real life water sounds!, jack-o-lantern, gross carpet, shiny trinkets found on the streets of NYC, glitter!!, squishy foam, fuzzy dust, and a plastic Minnie Mouse hair bow found on the boardwalk of Coney Island on Fourth of July 2019.

Photo: Kathryn Ann Miller.

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ABOVE: Welcome to Bleach Hell!, 2017 Bleach on stretched black fabric 17” x 18” Photo: Kathryn Ann Miller

LEFT: Black Dutch, 2017 Oil on stretched canvas, Sculpey, garland 24” x 36” Photo: Kathryn Ann Miller

OPPOSITE PAGE: Spaghette, 2016 Glazed ceramics, acrylic, house paint, glitter 12” x 12” x 18” Photo: Kathryn Ann Miller

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BRADLEY PITTS Bradley Pitts was born and raised in New York City. He studied art, architecture, and engineering at MIT and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (NL). His work has been shown at the Jewish Museum, Pioneer Works, UC Riverside, Netherlands Institute for Media Art (NL), and Kunsthalle Bern (CH), among other venues.

EXHIBITED WORKS: For My Sweet Baby Boy, Love Daddy (Tar Pit), 2021 Tar; one month of my non-biodegradable trash; personal belongings of my grandfather, father, son, and myself; air vent; polyurethane; silicone; scent oils; aromatic diffuser 54” x 276” x 96”

bradleypitts.net @bradleypittsdotnet bmpitts@gmail.com

#jetskilife, 2021 Oil and acrylic on panel 20” x 16” x 2.25”

My work speaks to loss without physical absence—an experience that relates both to the environmental and socioeconomic precarities of the current moment as well as my growing up in an alcoholic home.

My materials (whether found, purchased, made, harvested, or acquired for personal use) are employed as residue—of systems and cultures, of thoughts and beliefs, of lives lived and actions performed. The resulting works are pile-ups of physical and mental forms in which my materials are forced to meet and grapple with one another. As with any forced cohabitation, some of the elements find harmony with their neighbors while others produce conflict or contradiction. Some a tense silence.

The work is often emotional, funny, serious, and ironic at the same time.

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RIGHT: Detail of untitled (fountain), 2019 Painting crate, saw horses, iron slag, water, plants, pump, grow lamp 75” x 64” x 55” BELOW: Methane bubbles in the La Brea Tar Pits Photo credit: Betsy Weber

ABOVE: Geology Now, 2019 Oil on panel, silkscreen on paper, bulletin board, staples 36” x 48” LEFT, INSET: Emergency Fire Pit, 2020 Wood, paracord, knife, emergency blanket, crank radio, headlamp, bone 16” x 50” x 40”

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STIPAN TADIĆ Stipan Tadić was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1986. He finished his MA in Painting, graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2011. He earned his MFA at Columbia University School of the Arts, Visual Arts Department in 2020. His first solo show was in 2009 and has since participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Besides painting, he has executed several murals in public spaces, in Croatia and abroad. Tadić has also been engaged in the world of independent comic books, publishing his work around Europe since 2014. He is the co-organizer of the Biennial exhibition of Antisalon in Zagreb, which began in 2008. Tadić is the recipient of several awards, domestic and international. Currently, he is living and working in Brooklyn, New York. stipantadic.net @stipan.tadic stipan32@gmail.com

RIGHT: Bacon Egg and Cheese, 2021 Oil on canvas 30" x 24" NEXT SPREAD, LEFT On the corner, 2021 Oil on canvas 60" x 40" NEXT SPREAD, RIGHT Tompkins, 2021 Oil on canvas 30" x 24"

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KIYOMI QUINN TAYLOR Kiyomi Quinn Taylor (b.1995) was born and raised in South Orange, New Jersey. Taylor received her BFA from New York University in 2017 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2020. In her work, Kiyomi examines her family’s narrative history as well as iconography of her Black and Japanese heritage. She uses painting, drawing, collage, installation, stop-motion animation, performance, and sculpture to create spaces and tableaus. Through them, the audience is invited to share in her inner life through meditations on time travel, ancestral memory, and the chaotic force of love. She currently lives and works in New York City.

RIGHT: Dino Band (Open Studios Installation/Performance), 2019

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ABOVE: Night Drive (Animation Still), 2020 Watercolor, ink, collage, vinyl, human hair on paper 13 " x 14" LEFT: Happy Birthday, Baby, 2020 Oil, acrylic, ink, watercolor, collage, fabric and thread on canvas 66" x 48" OPPOSITE PAGE: Gorilla, My Love, 2020 Oil, acrylic, ink, watercolor, collage, fabric and thread on canvas 64" x 84 1/4"

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MEREDITH PENCE WILSON Meredith Pence Wilson was born in Jefferson City, Missouri. She is an artist living in New York City.

Then I turned around to that desert ground Saw the spot I would see no more As I was riding away I heard the pale moon say Farewell pal, it sure gets lonesome here.

A lonely spot I know where no man will go Where the shadows have all the room I was riding free on the old SP Humming a southern tune When a man came along, made me hush my song Kicked me off, Way Out There

Bob Nolan, 1936

As she pulled out of sight I turned to the right A left and everywhere But all I could see was a cactus tree And a prairie dog playing there I watched the prairie dog feed on the tumbleweed That’s his home, Way Out There So I threw down my load in the desert road Rested my weary legs too I watched the sinking sun make the tall shadows run Out across that barren plain Then I hummed a tune to that rising moon He gets lonesome, Way Out There So I closed my eyes to the starlit skies And lost myself in dreams I dreamed the desert sand was a milk and honey land Then I awoke with a start There’s the train coming back on that one way track Gonna take me Away From Here As she was passing by I caught her on the fly I climbed in an open door

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Haters and Losers (detail), 2021 Acrylic, gouache, and etching on paper on board 20” x 24”

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Holy Rollers (detail), 2021 Acrylic, gouache, and etching on paper on board 20” x 24”

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Way Out There (detail), 2021 Acrylic, gouache, and etching on paper on board 20” x 24”

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MARK YANG Mark Yang (born 1994, Seoul, South Korea) immigrated to Los Angeles with his family when he was nine years old. He earned his BFA from Art Center College of Design (2017) and his MFA from Columbia University (2020). He had his first debut solo exhibition at Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2021) and recent group exhibitions include Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2020); Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York (2020); CP Projects Space, New York (2019) and Ki Smith Gallery, New York (2019). markyangstudio.com

Mark Yang creates paintings that incorporate formal concerns relating to color, line and composition while addressing his fascination with the human body and its relationships. In depicting nude male bodies in close proximity–wrestling, grappling and contorting–Yang aims to convey an aspect of male intimacy that is omitted in American culture. In doing so, he connects his work to art historical forbearers–Greek vessels, Eakins, Muybridge, and Bacon. While there are many categories within identity-based contemporary art, the one irreducible category is the body. Despite differences of ethnicity, nationality, belief, gender and sexual orientation, everyone has a body.

Starting with this basic understanding, Yang adds his vision of the male body to the history of art.

RIGHT: Wrestler in the Night, 2020 Oil on canvas 48” x 36” NEXT SPREAD: Body Double, 2021 Steve Turner, Los Angeles

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YI SA-RA Yi Sa-Ra (born Seoul, South Korea) is a video artist and filmmaker working between Seoul and New York. She holds an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts (2020) and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2011). She also attended the Yale Summer School of Art and Music in Norfolk (2010). Yi has received grants and awards from AHL Foundation, New York, and JoongAng Ilbo Culture Media, Seoul, among others. Her work has been exhibited and screened in South Korea, Japan and the U.S. yisara.com

My work navigates shifting perspectives around personal experiences, defining their place in our societal moment. Addressing issues both intimate and societal, I produce

videos and films about memory, trauma, agency and relationships. My process consists of multiple stages. It starts out open-ended as I follow my curiosity, collecting information related to firsthand experiences: sound recording my daily life and conducting video interviews. On a large piece of paper, I then diagram complex maps of ideas outlining and contextualizing the information I gather, which later evolves into storyboards and scripts for my videos.

My current video series, including Clinch and when stretched too thin, consists of short films told from the perspective of temporary female immigrants. As the characters are confronted with the difficulties of immigration, unemployment, and alienation, the work details the psychological effects brought upon by the current economic landscape in the U.S.

Diagrams for Clinch (Part), 2019 Marker on paper

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TOP: Clinch, 2019 Installation view Wallach Art Gallery, New York

BOTTOM: Clinch, 2019 Installation view Wallach Art Gallery, New York

NEXT SPREAD: when stretched too thin, 2020–2021 Video still

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MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN There is no greater pleasure for me as Dean of the School of the Arts, than to witness the thesis events for the four programs that comprise the School of the Arts—Visual Arts, Writing, Theatre and Film.

This past year these annual events have been suspended, postponed, or reoriented as a result of COVID-19. Like the rest of the world, the School of the Arts has been deeply affected by the immobilizing barriers to movement and production presented by the pandemic.

It is therefore even more spectacular that we now are able to exhibit the Thesis Show for the Class of 2020 in our luminous venue—the Lenfest Center for the Arts.

The Thesis exhibition in Visual Arts is the culmination of two years of hard work. It is the moment at which the students (soon to be alumni) choose how to represent their creative time at the School of the Arts. And this year the achievement of exhibiting the work is even more extraordinary since the conditions for production have been intense and less than ideal. But still the creative spirit has prevailed and students have produced remarkable work.

As always, the exhibition will be varied, unexpected, at times profound, and full of exuberance. There will be great interest in the work of this next generation of artists, especially because they have had to produce it under extremely difficult conditions. We will do everything we can to make the exhibition visible to as many viewers as possible. I am

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sure all those who experience this work will find it fascinating and exhilarating as a record of the creative development of these artists and also of a historical moment.

Carol Becker Dean of Faculty Columbia University School of the Arts

MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR OF THE VISUAL ARTS PROGRAM On behalf of the faculty of the Visual Arts Program I welcome you to the MFA Thesis Exhibition for the class of 2020.

Our thanks go to Betti-Sue Hertz, Director and Chief Curator of the Wallach Gallery; the entire staff of the Wallach; Lauren Weigel, General Manager of the Lenfest Center for the Arts and the Lenfest staff. Special thanks are owed to our intrepid curator, Amy Sadao, for guiding our students through the process of mounting such an ambitious show during a very challenging time. In Visual Arts we have an amazing program administration and staff who tirelessly dedicate their care and attention to our students: Rebecca Birkhan, Former Assistant Shops and Safety Manager; Andrew Brehm, Safety Manager; Dana Buhl, Photography Facilities Manager; Nathan Catlin, Neiman Studio and Project Manager; Peter Clough, Former Assistant Director of Visual Arts Instructional Technology; Carrie Gundersdorf, Director of Academic Administration; Cary Hulbert, Assistant Studio Manager, LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies; Julie Malen, Shops Monitor; Laura Mosquera, Manager of Academic Administration; Samantha Rippner, Associate Director and Gallery Manager, LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies; Sarah Tortora, Shops Monitor; Rider Urena, Senior Manager of Visual Arts Facilities; Claire Valdez, Program Assistant; Jon Waites, Shops Monitor; and Patrice Washington, Prentis Hall Facilities

Manager. At the School of the Arts our thanks also go to Carol Becker, Dean of Faculty, Gavin Browning, Director of Public Programs and Engagement; Sarah Congress, Executive Assistant to the Deans; Tiffany Davis, Communications Assistant; Joel Jares, SOA Photographer; Joshua Mackey, Assistant Director, Student Affairs; Laila Maher, Dean of Student and Alumni Affairs; Carey McHugh, Assistant Director of Communications; Christina Rumpf, Director of Communications; Trenton Pollard, Assistant Director of Alumni Affairs and the Artists' Resource Center; Kristina Tate, Assistant Director of Communications; Peter Vaughan, Director of Motion Picture and Information Technology, and Jana Wright, Dean of Academic Administration and Planning.

Most importantly, we thank our students.

Without you there would be no exhibition and we would not be gathered, spatially distant, here today. It has taken us three years to arrive at this wonderful moment. Your perseverance has been an inspiration to all of us and it has been a privilege working with you, learning from you, and to trying our hardest to support you in all that you aspire to do and all that you deserve. We pledge to continue this support now that you are leaving our program and joining us as colleagues in the field.

Yours, Matthew Buckingham Associate Professor of Professional Practice Chair, Visual Arts Columbia University School of the Arts

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ABOUT THE SCHOOL OF THE ARTS Columbia University School of the Arts awards the Master of Fine Arts degree in Film, Theatre, Visual Arts, and Writing and the Master of Arts degree in Film and Media Studies; it also offers an interdisci­plinary program in Sound Art. The School is a thriving, diverse community of talented, visionary, and committed artists from around the world and a faculty comprised of acclaimed and internationally renowned artists, film and theatre directors, writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, play­wrights, producers, critics, and scholars. In 2015, the School marked the 50th Anniversary of its founding. In 2017, the School opened the Lenfest Center for the Arts, a multi-arts venue designed as a hub for the presen­tation and creation of art across disciplines on the University’s new Manhattanville campus. The Lenfest hosts exhibitions, performances, screen­ings, symposia, readings, and lectures that present new, global voices and perspectives, as well as an exciting, publicly accessible home for Columbia’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery.

SOUND ART PROGRAM, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF THE ARTS Columbia University has been at the helm of sound innovation for over fifty years with faculty specializing in composition, improvisation, music theory, musicology, installation, sculpture, instrument building, acoustics, music cognition, and software development. Faculty from the Computer Music Center, along with colleagues from Music Composition, Visual Arts, Sound Studies, Ethnomusicology, Engineering, Computer and Data Science are all involved in the interdisciplinary area of Sound Art. The two-year program is highly selective, offering admission to only three or four students each year. Students with a deep engagement with sound as a medium join a diverse community of artists and musicians.

The Sound Art program is a studio-based degree offered by the Visual Arts Program in conjunction with the Computer Music Center. The program provides the opportunity to explore sound in the context of video, installation, and performance, as well as computer programming, historical archival research, and conceptual strategies for the production of creative work. Candidates are encouraged to consider diverse modalities for listening and hearing while developing fluency in the creation and manipulation of sound in the context of environmental, social, and gallery-centered work.

Visit arts.columbia.edu/sound-art.

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VISUAL ARTS PROGRAM, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF THE ARTS The Visual Arts Program attracts emerging artists of unusual promise from around the world. They comprise a vigorous community, working alongside an exceptional faculty at a world-renowned research institution in New York City.

Contemporary art has become increasingly interdisciplinary. To that end, the Visual Arts Program offers an MFA degree in Visual Arts rather than in specific media. The two-year studio program, taught by internationally celebrated artists, allows students to pursue digital media, drawing, installation, painting, performance, photography, printmaking, sculpture and video art.

Visit arts.columbia.edu/visual-arts.

ABOUT THE CURATOR Amy Rayko Sadao is a curator and consultant based in Philadelphia. She is currently the Program Director of Denniston Hill and works with Visions2030. She is part of the team curating FotoFest 2022, Houston and will organize Columbia University’s MFA Thesis Show for the class of 2022. She has been the Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director of ICA, Philadelphia and Executive Director of Visual AIDS. A mentor of artists and arts workers, Sadao was recognized with ArtTable’s New Leadership Award and as a Women in the Arts Leader by the Speaker of the New York City Council. Along with Nelson Santos, she was knighted by the Imperial Court of New York, the city’s oldest drag house, for their work as AIDS and art activists. She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and a MA in Comparative Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley and began her career as an intern at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris.

She is the Board Co-Chair of Asian Arts Initiative, serves on the board of Leeway Foundation, and is a Director Emeritus of Visual AIDS.

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THE MIRIAM AND IRA D. WALLACH ART GALLERY The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery advances Columbia University’s historical, critical, and creative engagement with the visual arts. Serving as both a laboratory and a forum, The Wallach Art Gallery offers opportunities for curatorial practice and discourse, while bridging the diverse appro­­ aches to the arts at the University with a welcome broader public. We present projects that: are organized by graduate students and faculty in Art History & Archaeology or by other Columbia scholars; focus on the contemporary artists of our campus and communities; or offer new scholarship on University special collections. Established in 1986, The Wallach Art Gallery is the University's premier visual arts space. The gallery has presented critically acc­la­imed exhibitions, and is a platform for a dynamic range of programming and publi­­­­ ca­tions that make lasting contributions to new scholarship. The Wallach Art Gallery also animates other university spaces as opportunity arises. Always free and open to the public, the Wallach Art Gallery operates in close relationship to the Depart­ment of Art History and Archaeology, School of the Arts, and the University Libraries (particu­larly Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library), which hold Columbia University’s collections.

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DONORS Columbia University School of the Arts is supported in part by contributions from alumni and friends of the arts. These gifts provide student fellowships, educational programming and awards. For more information or to make a contribution to the School of the Arts, please contact: Roberta W. Albert Associate Dean for Development 212-854-7724 ra481@columbia.edu The Visual Arts Program would like to extend special thanks to its contributors, and recognize those for whom fellowships and awards have been named: Anonymous (3) Aaron and Betty Lee Stern Foundation Kelly Akashi Rhoda Altman Gary Bandy Ramona Bannayan Holly and Albert Baril Dean Carol Becker Kenza Benbrahim Gordon Bloom The Bogdanow Family Fund Naomi Bossom Dana Buhl Kevin Burke Louis and Janice C. Choy CLEARING Gallery Professor Susanna J. Coffey H. Hartley Platt DuPont Ian Felstead Candia Fisher Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Norman Galinsky Francois Ghebaly Ann Gillen

Allison Ginsberg Alice Gordy Wenda Habenicht Hartley Corporation Hugh Hayden Studio, LLC Claire Heimarck Karen Hesse-Flatow Taryn Brooke Holloway Xin Huang Eric Javits Family Foundation Susan Johnson Warren Johnson Regina Ketting Edward J. Kimball Dong Kingman Kevin Klein Kraus Family Foundation Dwight Lee Lenfest Foundation Professor Nicola López Louis and Janice C. Choy Fund Raymond T. & Ann T. Mancini Family Foundation Trust Penelope Manzella Professor Miya J. Masaoka Meredithe Mastrella Pamela McCorduck James McCracken Asif Mian Tobias Munthe Laurie Nathan Northshore Community Foundation Katherine Parker Griffin Pero Christian Ritchey Margret Rivers Debora Ryan Minna Saslaw Jacob Arthur Collins/ The Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund Schwab Charitable The Leon J. Simkins Charitable Foundation Pawel Skonieczka Diana Soorikian The SJS Charitable Trust

Sally Tippman Richard L. Tooke Vanguard Charitable Vermont Community Foundation Justin Walker Joan Weber Gina Werfel Hon Chung Woo Richard Wright Joel Young Xianling Zhou Named Awards and Fellowships Aaron and Betty Lee Stern Foundation Artis Fellows Betty Lee Stern Prize for Painters Brevoort-Eickemeyer Fellowship and Prize D'Arcy Haymen Fellowships David Berg Foundation Fund Donald C. Brace Student Loan Fund Dong Kingman Fellowships Edward Mazzella, Jr. Endowed Fellowship Ellen Gelman Endowed Fellowship Faber Birren Fellowship George Raimes Beach Fund for Graphic Arts Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship Fund Helen R. Else Fellowship Herbert S Germaise Endowed Fellowship Jacques and Natasha Gelman Fellowship Fund Joan Sovern Endowed Fellowship Lenfest Fellowship LeRoy and Janet Neiman Fellowship Fund LeRoy Neiman Endowed Fellowship Louis and Janice C. Choy Fund Lucas T. Carlson Memorial Fund Marguerite P. Roche Endowed Fellowship Marrocco/Mancini Family Fellowship Fund Marshall Glaiser Endowed Fellowship for the Study of Drawing Martin Birnbaum Fellowship Morty Frank Traveling Fellowship Quinta Carolina Fund Ramona Bronkar Bannayan Fellowship Fund

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Solomon B. Hayden Fellowship for Visual Arts Students Student Relief Fund Sun Liangang Arts Fellowship The Andrew Fisher Fellowship Three Arts Club Endowed Fellowship Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Award TOMS Scholarship Visual Arts Graduate Fellowship

SOUND ART AND VISUAL ARTS FACULTY & STAFF Sound Art Faculty and Associated Faculty Miya Masaoka (Director), Seth Cluett (Assistant Director), Brad Garton, Ben Holtzman, Dave Sulzer, Associated Faculty: Zosha Di Castri, David Adamcyk, Douglas Repetto, Fall 2020: Keith Obadike (Critical Issues in Sound), Marina Rosenfeld (Artist Mentor) Sound Art Visiting Faculty / Artist Mentors Matthew Ostrowski, Sara Magenheimer, Spencer Yeh, Marina Rosenfeld Sound Art Guest Artists Raven Chacon, Michael Schumacher, Ed Osborn, Carver Audain, Phill Niblock, Katherine Liberovskya, Cecilia Lopez, Camille Norment, Kabir Carter, Margot Norton, Galen Joseph-Hunter, Byron Westbrook, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Julia Christensen, Maria Chavez, Christoph Cox, DJ Spooky, Ellen Fullman, Luke Dubois, Matthew Goodheart, Nicola Hein, Jennie C. Jones, Peter Kiefer, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Andrea Parkins, Carsten Seiffarth, Elliott Sharp, Richard Garet, Aura Satz Visual Arts Full-time Faculty Gregory Amenoff, Matthew Buckingham (Chair), Susanna Coffey (2020-21), Jon Kessler, Nicola López, Leeza Meksin, Aliza Nisenbaum, Shelly Silver, Sable Elyse Smith, Sarah Sze, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomas Vu-Daniel Visual Arts Mentors Mark Dion, Rochelle Feinstein, Valerie Hammond, David Humphrey, Michael Joo, Ralph Lemon, Rachelle Mozman,

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Matthew Ritchie, Rona Yefman, Craig Zammiello Visual Arts Graduate Adjunct Faculty Shirly Bahar, Regine Basha, Jackie Battenfield, Gabo Camnitzer, Jennifer Coates, Tyler Coburn, Dana DeGiulio, Lizzy De Vita, Delphine Fawundu, Valerie Hammond, Benjamin Keating, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Ajay Kurian, Justine Kurland, Pamela Sneed, Sara VanDerBeek Visual Arts Visiting Critics Yevgeniya Baras, Erica Baum, Dora Budor, Tyler Coburn, Moyra Davey, Liz Deschenes, Amber Esseiva, Derek Fordjour, Nikita Gale, Alan Gilbert, Marcela Guerrero, Rosario Güiraldes, Josephine Halvorson, Dana Hoey, Katherine Hubbard, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Chrissie Iles, Tom Kalin, Baseera Khan, Lucy Kim, Nora Lawrence, Carolyn Lazard, Sam Lewitt, Justine Ludwig, Jill Magid, Tala Madani, Guadalupe Maravilla, Eileen Myles, Dona Nelson, Ken Okiishi, Sarah Oppenheimer, Sheila Pepe, Sondra Perry, Will Rawls, Sara Reisman, Daniela Rivera, Legacy Russell, Tschabalala Self, Josh Siegel, Kyle Staver, Lumi Tan, Lynne Tillman, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Didier William, John Yau

Peter Clough, Former Assistant Director, Visual Arts Instructional Technology Carrie Gundersdorf, Director of Academic Administration Cary Hulbert, Assistant Studio Manager of the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies Julie Malen, Shops Monitor Laura Mosquera, Manager of Academic Administration Samantha Rippner, Associate Director and Gallery Manager of the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies Sarah Tortora, Shops Monitor Rider Urena, Senior Manager of Visual Arts Facilities & Prentis Hall Claire Valdez, Program Assistant Jon Waites, Shops Monitor Patrice Washington, Prentis Hall Facilities Manager

Visual Arts Staff Rebekah Birkhan, Former Assistant Shops and Safety Manager Andrew Brehm, Shops and Safety Manager Dana Buhl, Manager of Photography Facilities Nathan Catlin, Master Printer and Studio Manager of the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies

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