2016 MFA Thesis Exhibition

2016 MFA THESIS EXHIBI TION MAASS SHOW 1

Michael Barraco | Lydia Goldbeck Sarah Hewitt | Owen Hunter Richard & Dolly Maass Gallery Visual Arts Building, Purchase College ON VIEW: March 31−April 31 13, 2016 RECEPTION: Thursday, March 31, 4:30−7pm

MAASS SHOW 2

Teke Cocina | Eleanor King Dustina Sherbine | Phumelele Tshabalala Richard & Dolly Maass Gallery Visual Arts Building, Purchase College ON VIEW: April 18−29, 18 2016 RECEPTION: Thursday, April 21 4:30−7pm

MOMENTA GALLERY

All Second Year MFA Students 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY ON VIEW: May 6−15, 6 2016 RECEPTION: Friday, May 6, 77−9pm Open Thursday Thursday−Sunday, 12−6pm

CONTRIBUTORS Essays by Master of Arts in Art History students: JENNIFER CONRAD GRACE CONVERSE MICHAEL P. HOWARD CAITLIN MONACHINO and by FAYE HIRSCH Faye Hirsch is Visiting Associate Professor at Purchase College, SUNY, and coordinator of the Master of Fine Arts program, Art+Design.

Š 2016 Purchase College, State University of New York. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission.

Designed by Kara Gnehm and Patrick Sluiter for Community Design in Spring 2016 with Professor Robin Lynch and Sarah Hewitt.

ACCI DENTS INTO INCI DENTS

2016 MFA THESIS EXHIBITION  MICHAEL BARRACO  

TEKE COCINA

LYDIA GOLDBECK

 SARAH HEWITT  OWEN HUNTER  ELEANOR KING

 DUSTINA SHERBINE

 PHUMELELE TSHABALALA

 THE RARE COHORT by FAYE HIRSCH

MICHAEL BARRACO MICHAELBARRACOSTUDIO.COM

Brooklyn-based artist Michael Barraco explores the lines between humans and nature, science and art, the ephemeral and the tactile. Stemming from a residency in Nova Scotia in the summer of 2015, Barraco’s video project Moon Snails focuses on the aquatic lifeforms in a leech pond. Lake leeches are widely regarded as grotesque and undesirable. The video, which in Nova Scotia was projected upon a screen placed in the middle of a pond on a moonless light, perplexed viewers with its illusionistic similarity to a full moon (the creatures swam against a circular beam of light). Barraco created a seamless unity between the looping video and the structure that the video was projected upon, so that it appeared as a celestial apparition.

Barraco’s most recent work, Let Me Tell You About the Birds and the Bees (2015), installs a picture frame fitted with a one-way mirror video into a false wall. Behind, a video of a recently deceased bird alternates with another of a domesticated beehive. Here Barraco provocatively alludes to the metaphor commonly used by parents to explain human reproduction to children, problematizing it through a reference to the dwindling populations of the earth’s birds and bees. Periodically backlit to flash the videos, the mirror then returns the viewer’s image, forcing him or her to reflect on his or her role in destruction of the natural world.

Barraco implicates viewers while concurrently eliciting a sense of empathy and awareness in the face of economic and environmental uncertainty.

The experience of the residency and Moon Snails jettisoned Barraco into an exploration of the crossovers between science and the arts. His Urban Birding Project, which is being created in conjunction with FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program) Canada, takes the burgeoning phenomenon of geo-caching, directing it toward the ongoing die-off of migratory birds.

Some are killed by crashing into man-made structures, others perish from the effects of pollution. Barraco has created an online interactive world map, and users around the world are invited to document and upload their own photographic records of bird deaths along with identifying locations where the deaths occurred. At the sight of these decaying birds, viewers must become self-reflective about their place in the Anthropocene, the geological and ecological era that humankind has promulgated through intervention and apathy.

Baracco’s projects take shape in a manner similar to scientific methodologies, evolving outside of the studio and derived from his own research. He also adopts the role of the collector and archivist, taking the information gathered and presenting it to the public through whatever material means suit it best. He calls his data “experiential visual poetry” that releases the viewer into overlapping arenas of the arts, science and philosophy.

by Michael P. Howard

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  (detail)

2015, 4' x 4', Video Installation, 06:27 Looped Opposite Page, Top

 , 2015, 10" x 40', Neon

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 , 2015, Website

urbanbirding.org

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TEKE COCINA TEKECOCINA.COM

The queer male body has long been stigmatized, but it has also been used by artists as a powerful topos to subvert societal norms. It is a dilemma that Teke Cocina unpacks in his print-based work. Through the lens of the body and gay culture as a whole, he wrangles queerness into a kind of normalization, using prints, texts and installations that include both imagery of the male body and more elliptical representations.

A printmaker, Cocina nonetheless breaks free from the binds of medium as he reads through theory and philosophy, He redeploys Rosalind Krauss’s paradigm as laid out in her 1979 essay, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," applying her models to printed media. He has begun to employ a vastly diverse and flexible approach under the influences of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976) and Lee Edelman’s “Sitnthomosexuality” (in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke University Press, 2004). Such works inform his multi-medium installations, related suites of works based on the constructedness of the queer body in art history, pop culture and a commodified economy.

On October 9, 1992, a meteorite crashed near Peekskill, N.Y. For I’ve come from so far away to meet you… (2015), Cocina produced silkscreened bumper stickers and t-shirts, as well as step and repeat wall paper repr=oducing the image of a meteorite streaking through the sky, which changes meaning in relation to the titular text. With its playful message of desire, the text transforms the meteorite into a transient lover.

Setting up a pop-up shop of his objects and related materials that became kitschy souvenirs at Peekskill Project 6 in fall 2015, Cocina touched as well on the issue of the commodification and normalization of the gay male body.

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Two of Cocina’s companion works arose from his desire to combine the mediums of video and sculpture with his printmaking practice. UGH I Smell (2015), a to-scale sculpture of a deodorant container, fulfills his wish to create a dialogue about body identity without relying on indexicality. The sculpture slumps forward, encouraging the viewer to regard it anthropomorphically. The accompanying video, Ugh I Smell Like Him (2015), is, according to Cocina, the first efficacious use of text in one of his own works. Formally reminiscent of Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds, the video uses a Super Nintendo Entertainment System and video game cartridge to create a sense of nostalgia.

More recently, in Goltzius Ghosts #1 + #2 (2015), a print installation, Cocina continues to include texts but introduces anamorphic tricks that engage the viewer. Borrowing from and distorting the prints of the late 16th-century Dutch engraver Hendrick Goltzius, Cocina installs large copies in such a way that the contact point of the floor and the wall operates like the gutter in a book. Goltzius Ghosts encourages viewers to immerse themselves in the work, inspecting it in search of an integral moment of visual clarity-- only to be disappointed with its purposeful lack. This ongoing theme of denial of the expectation of a “satisfying” angle from which to view a large male nude is in keeping with Cocina’s concerns, and will remain a preoccupation in new work whether or not Goltzius remains in play.

by Michael P. Howard

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i hope he's like me / i hope he likes me, 2015, 45" x 30", Archival Inkjet Diptych on Rives BFK Bottom

  #1 + #2, 2015, 10' x 10', Archival Inkjet on Vinyl Opposite Page, Left

    , 2015, 26" x 30" x 20", Looped Video, Magnavox Television, Mario Paint https://youtu.be/C6FuFKr85tE

Opposite Page, Right

  , 2015, 5.5" x 2.5" x 1.5", Ceramic (Edition of 5) 7

LYDIA GOLDBECK LYDIAGOLDBECK.COM

Lydia Goldbeck questions culturally engrained binaries through playful subversion. Good or bad, noisy or quiet, depressed or euphoric, beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid. Heaven or hell. Goldbeck shapes ubiquitous materials like cardboard and concrete into religious symbols. Her hand-drawn animations of anthropomorphic gravestones heave their living breath in and out. In her work, the figure is ever present, untethered from gender; if we are no longer defined by one gender, it is possible to be both. In Goldbeck’s Pull (2015), there is fluidity of form and meaning.

A pulley system, braced to the wall by a piece of wood, suspends a cascade of canvas saturated in concrete and left to harden. A translucent pink plastic bar acts as a brace, forcing the cloth open. We see both surface and interior space. The hardened cloth refers back to classical marble sculpture carved into elaborate draped folds. As in Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, no flesh is revealed; instead, the sensuality of the present is expressed in a covered body.

Goldbeck’s materials and imagery are humble, unlike Bernini’s. The drapery in Pull comes to resemble a “body” that falls slumped, with the pulley attached to the base of its neck. The lifeless cloth refers to a now-absent body. The form conveys absence but also a union of anatomy with folded fabric. It is vaginal, while the bar prying it open is phallic. Death and sensuality, a pair so often linked in so many contexts, are present here, as well. A text central to

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-, 2016, 73" x 26" x 25", Bronze, wooden saw horses, pink latex, cinder blocks Bottom Left

, 2015, 22" x 15", Stone Lithograph Bottom Right

, 2015, 95" x 13" x 6", Cement, plaster, linen, plastic, nylon rope, wood, hook, pulley

her present thinking is The Denial of Death, a 1973 book by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. As she read it, Goldbeck found her thoughts resonating with those of the author, who observes that humans want to create ideas or material objects that will live on eternally after they have died. Thus they give their lives meaning. Becker also views biological gender as arbitrary, arguing that society creates systems to emphasize and separate people into groups.

Looking at gender identification as a spectrum, one can see how each individual can fall at various points along that line.

Goldbeck explores theory through action. In the studio, seeking equilibrium, she tests the limits of her own physicality as she manipulates her work to find its points of balance.

Moving through levels of precariousness, she repeatedly assembles her materials and lets them fall until the balance point is discovered, a series of failures leading to success. In Strap On (2016), she adjusts sawhorses, balancing them on top of one another in relationship to concrete blocks. Here, asymmetry became the solution for balance, as demonstrated in the pendulum. Tying pink latex supports around just one sawhorse leg, Goldbeck adjusted the pendulum, allowing it to become centered in its suspension. As always, her process collapses binaries and expectations. We find God in the mundane, laugh at death and realize the other half is already inside us.

by Jennifer Conrad

SARAH HEWITT SARAHHEWITT.COM

Her chroma is techno/color, like a rave gone mad, with jarring brights, neons and shiny materials. Rough Rider (2015) incorporates ten different colors/types of yarn interwoven with gold party foil streamers, a fluffy pink pompon and neon orange flag tape. Strands of yarn radiate from the main body of the weaving to pull it taut to the wall, and the frenetic lines read like highway arteries on a map.

New Mexico’s license plates announce the state as the “land of enchantment.” Sarah Hewitt spent years in that place of convergence, where the opulent decoration of Spanish Catholicism coexists with the spare, abstract symbols of Native American culture. In dictionaries, to enchant is “to exert magical influence upon; to bewitch, lay under a spell.” Between the wars, the French writer and mystic Romain Rolland (1866-1984) identified the “oceanic feeling” as a sensation of connection to everyone and everything in the world, reaching into the primordial. You sense that kind of connection in Hewitt’s work.

Watching her in her studio, you see her wielding her materials without restriction, as if in conversation with other times and realms. To be in the presence of her weavings and sculpture is to feel the energy of another being beside you.

Hewitt’s additive process resonates with that of the artist Judith Scott (1943-2005), who began each sculpture with an object, wielded like a talisman, which she would wrap with yarn and other fibers, sometimes inserting additional objects until she decided it was complete. In contrast to Scott’s, however, Hewitt’s sculptures are sensual and fecund, entwining male and female anatomy. She aims to protect, swaddle and enfold in vibrant materials that are woven, crocheted and hand-sewn.

Through repetitive and meditative movement, her weavings emerge as sculptural skins in which intuitive feeling balances with tangible materials. Hewitt voraciously devours a wide range of sources, from theoretical texts to artifacts of visual culture. Among her myriad inspirations: Navajo patterns, Missy Elliott videos, Gustav Klimt paintings. The feminine is essential. Consciously evoking feminist art history, her work traces back to Womanhouse (1972), the landmark installation organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro that reclaimed craft as a legitimate concern of fine art. Hewitt delights in castoff materials, sourcing from warehouse remnants of plastic gold chain, trims of plastic raspberry beads and pompons galore.

Hewitt’s haptic aesthetic converses with that of the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko, and in fact Hewitt references the Rothko Chapel in a dream proposal for her own temple of contemplation. Rothko wished to offer viewers a transcendent experience in the presence of his paintings. “To drag you into the sacred without consent”: Hewitt’s aim, stated on her website, lands us in a similar place, opening a portal within.

by Jennifer Conrad

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,  and , 2015, variable dimensions, Hand woven yarns, twine, flag tape, nails; hand built ceramic elements, trimming, thread, deconstructed wicker elephant; clay elements with woven connections, tape and beads. Installation for Medium Rare, 2015 Richard & Dolly Maass Gallery MFA Exhibition.

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  (), 2015, 71.5" x 36" x 4", Woven and stitched yarn, burlap, twines, mylar, flag tape, ceramic elements, nails, sequins, graphite Bottom

 , 2015, 36" x 42", Mixed media on multiple layers of mylar 11

OWEN HUNTER OWEN-HUNTER.COM

see a slice of the local area in an artwork that both reflects its environment and engulfs the viewer. As we visually delve into the piece, we discover in fragments or whole objects a wide variety of materials, from a blue shovel and broom head to remnants of a bicycle wheel. The implication is that these, too, will decompose after the panels come apart, completing the circuit.

A beautifully intricate slab of gleaming rainbow colors, Owen Hunter’s Comstock Cake, a sculpture he showed in the fall 2015 MFA exhibition “Medium Rare,” recalled a school of glistening fish swimming down a crowded stream. The work rested on a white pedestal in the center of the room and was enclosed in a Plexiglas cube. At first, it seemed to be a sort of multi-colored woven textile with a lustrous sheen. Upon inspecting it more closely, you could see that it was composed of many fragments of soap. Over time, a subtle dewy mist formed around the upper portion of the case; assembled while wet, the soap pieces exuded moisture.

While it was on view, the sculpture seemed to be alive and breathing. Displayed like a dessert under a cake dome, Comstock Cake in fact had a shelf life. As it dried out, it slowly lost its lively color and fell apart.

Hunter’s work is evocative of Allan Kaprow’s action collages which, similarly to Polder, used mass-produced, throwaway products, as William Kaizen writes, “to create a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life of the commodity” (“Framed Space: Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting,” Grey Room 3, 2003, p. 94). Hunter’s work sometimes follows a similar trajectory. But as he says, his ideas arise as well from his interest in gaming and the concept of an interface. The idea is of making a static object that is constantly learned and renewed and that exists only to pass time.

Growing up as an avid game-player, the artist prides himself on creating fun pieces, expressive of games with no end, that welcome people to the idea of open-ended participation.

The presence of a transformative and ever-changing cycle is apparent in his art; both Comstock Cake and Polder strongly reinforce in the mind of the viewer the effects of time and the ongoing processes of life and art.

Hunter explains that he only unconsciously created the work in order to self-destruct. Yet temporality and impermanence are hallmarks of his practice, leading us to find meaning primarily through his art-making processes.

For the group show Peekskill Project 6, also fall 2015, Hunter contributed Polder, a site-specific work displayed on the exterior wall of a local building. He adjoined leftover school desktops, frosted them with construction adhesive and assembled upon them a concentrated display, oddly dazzling, of trash collected from the vicinity. Panel by panel, we

by Caitlin Monachino

Opposite Page Top

, 2014, 42" x 96", Printer Ink on Paper Middle

  , 2015, Dimensions Variable, Cardboard, Paint, Staples

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, 2015, 6 tiles, each tile 52" x 46", Site-scavenged debris, Adhesive 14

ELEANOR KING ELEANORKING.COM

Conjuring a Waldenesque world, Eleanor King’s Dark Utopian (2015), a site-specific installation at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, investigated the seductive promise of a childhood spent partly in the rural woods of Nova Scotia. As a young girl, King learned that civilization can both respect the trees of the earth and use them to build. Though she is caught between idealistic and fatalistic feelings regarding our ecological future, King’s installation, constructed of wall paintings, drawings, sculpture and sound, immersed the viewer in an experience of, as King puts it, a “utopian proposal to live and work with a minimal carbon footprint.”

a performative, ephemeral gesture, the resulting images comprise swollen, organic tubes that slither around the paper in arbitrary directions. Within the installation, a related work, CD Worm sat idly by. King refers to this sculpture as a “sister” to her Wormhole drawings, but they are not twins.

Just over three feet long, CD Worm stacks hundreds of CDs to create an insect-like figure. The base of the sculpture sits on the floor, while the body climbs upwards in a curvaceous pose supported by a steel-rope spine that also serves to attach the “worm” to the wall.

Set against King’s paintings, with their earnest exposition of land and sea, King’s CD-related works call our attention to the inherent obsolescence of man-made things. Still, in using these materials, King does not necessarily pronounce technology as wasteful. How do we find a balance between preservation and productivity? One answer lies in her repurposing and neatly stacking these objects. Creating monuments rather than piles of garbage, she advocates for sustainability in the recycling of antiquated media. Even as she opens a conversation regarding the price of progress, however, King maintains a respect for mankind’s technological progress. Her interest in human activity, climate change and consumer excess within the Anthropocene era is expressed in one fluid motion showing man as both inhabitant and creator. Dark Utopian highlights the overarching philosophy of her work, captivating the viewer like a pendulum swinging hypnotically between opposing poles.

The foundational piece of Dark Utopian was an extravagant floor-to-ceiling wall painting, Deepwater Horizon (BP), which wrapped around the entirety of the gallery. A sprawling abstracted silhouette of the coastline between Halifax and New York is depicted along the top edge, while a complex pattern of broad stripes and geometric forms below evokes water. While it hints at the idea of sailing, the striking work is inspired by the “dazzle camouflage” painting technique used on vessels during World War I to confuse and avert enemies. Thick diagonals and hazardous-looking chevrons in varying shades of blue, green and gray, contrasted with the intricate edges of land, created a mesmerizing experience for the viewer.

King’s almost magical evocation of a time and place was offset by examples of her ongoing Wormhole drawings, which were posted intermittently along the walls. Tracings of an unknown CD are repeated over and over until the colored pencils making them are worn down completely. Recording

by Caitlin Monachino

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 , 2015, 163' x 11.5'; variable, Latex paint on wall; found boats, coloured pencil on paper. Photo credit: Steve Farmer Middle

 ,  , 2015, 80’' x 12', Latex paint on wall

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  ⁄  , 2016, 12' x 11' each (on opposite facing walls), Latex paint on wall 16

DUSTINA SHERBINE DUSTINASHERBINE.COM

Dustina Sherbine excavates narratives that lie dormant in the landscapes, exchanges and objects around us, revealing subtle veins of truth about people’s struggles, cultural histories and community strife. She searches the world around her for untold stories, and with deference to these stories, experiments until she has found the mode that is most apt— be it video, photography, books or object-based installations.

Manipulating what she has made or found—video footage, printed images, collected objects, the public and private spaces around her—she allows her quasi-documentary narratives to unfold on their own, adapting her means to suit each subject and reveal its particular poignancy.

In her multifaceted 2015 project The Red Record, Sherbine questions our relationship to nature, local history and labor. Oysters were once an economic mainstay of New York; they were also a staple of local Lenape communities, as evidenced in numerous ancient dumping sites that intrigued Sherbine. Contacting restaurants throughout the region, she collected thousands of oyster shells, creating three installations last fall for Peekskill Project 6. Her exploration of the invisibility of the Lenape extended to that of more recent communities in northern Manhattan, where she lives. In Nothing to See Here (East Harlem Intermission on the Circleline Boat Tour), 2015, she taped a Circle Line boat tour in which the tour guide went silent when the

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     , 2016, looping projection, dimensions variable Top

 , 2015, video with sound, 8:19

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    (East Harlem Intermission on the CircleLine Boat Tour),

2016, video with sound, 13:08

matter. Her artistry lies in her graceful restraint, her ability to refrain from forcing explanations, which enables viewers to pause, consider and seek answers to the questions that motivated her to document.

craft passed impoverished Harlem, a shocking elision that highlighted her questions about how it has become the norm to be mute and blind to entire communities.

The voices of her neighborhood speak, by contrast, in Crossing Broadway, as she tapes her walk across neighborhoods undergoing gentrification.

Sherbine sees herself as motivated by many of today’s most pressing problems: racial violence and stigma, cyclical poverty, and challenges to social mobility for marginalized communities. While quick to identify her own role in these problems, she seeks nonetheless to assuage them somewhat by noticing them. Through layers of awareness—of self, of community, of details, of history—Sherbine’s work issues a powerful call to arms: pay attention.

Parsing ideology and objectivity, viewers find that they understand facts that may have otherwise been closed from view. In Nothing to See Here the urban infrastructure of New York’s most underserved population is seen, rather than the big-name retail stores and celebrity landmarks of the city. Crossing Broadway offers an intimate glimpse of people in the city who might otherwise go unnoticed.

Sherbine rearranges the hierarchies of her subject or subject

by Grace Converse

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PHUMELELE TSHABALALA PHUMELELETSHABALALA.COM

Phumelele Tshabalala’s prints and installations illuminate instances when the thread between us snags, when our universal pulse grows rapid with angst, and when the terms and codes by which we live are tested. Such moments challenge his belief in a universal love among all people. A devout Christian, he attempts in his art to reconcile the stinging truths that he observes in the world with what he feels is a true existence of grace and compassion among all people.

In South Africa, he grew up attempting to reconcile the ugliness of violence toward women and members of his community with the beauty of the country and his faith in love between people. Now, living in New York as a member of a diaspora, his experiences have grown more complex. He reconciles the pull of New York with the magnetism of his home country; the harsh treatment of black people in the United States with the color-blind warmth he feels from his cohort of artists at Purchase; and the respect and love he has for all people with the senseless violence that implies that some people’s lives do not matter.

In his work, Tshabalala explores the interstices of social conflicts. In an installation of five large photographic portraits he celebrated five women who spoke at Ground Zero on the occasion of the Pope’s visit to the United States. Yet in placing before them five silent microphones he acknowledged that these women are the exception. His piece asks its viewers to hear all women’s voices, not merely the few who have fought to be heard.

From far away in New York, Tshabalala feels that he can understand the woes of South Africa anew. Living amidst racial conflicts here, he sees the significance of his home country’s struggle for intercultural peace. Immigration is as much an issue there as here. In one large-scale monotype, Tshabalala manipulates the image of a foreign black man in South Africa who is being lit on fire by another black man, a native South African. Made in New York and reflecting on incidents far away, Tshablalala hopes to represent the suffering all people endure when violence goes unmitigated.

Tshabalala is himself vulnerable; he knows this and he accepts it. His own vulnerability connects him to a larger experience in which fear, love and acceptance converge. Scaling up his work and extending to mediums beyond those of drawing and woodcut (with which he arrived) allow him to frame an experience of greater complexity. His mode of working reflects new paradigms: he has moved from technical diligence and skill—from things he already knows—to diligence in questioning, exploration and experimentation.

Tshabalala’s field of vision and understanding has grown— its boundaries are generous and span two continents, two countries, and an exponential number of conflicts in each nation. His art has become more generous in turn, allowing viewers to follow their own issues of reconciliation.

by Grace Converse

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  , 2015, 64” x 44”, Mixed Media Left to Right

 1, 2015, 30” x 22”, Mixed Media Monotype  2, 2015, 30” x 22”, Mixed Media Monotype  3, 2015, 30” x 22”, Mixed Media Monotype 20

THE RARE COHORT

BY FAYE HIRSCH

Last fall, the Hudson River community of Peekskill mounted its citywide festival Peekskill Project 6. Among the participants were students from Purchase College’s extraordinary MFA class of 2016, who mounted ingenious projects with little funding and in spite of the competing demands of student work and teaching. In their two years at Purchase, it feels as though these artists have mounted dozens of shows, so diverse is their work and so open are they are to critically engaging their own and each other’s practices. One never knows what to expect from them.

At Peekskill, they were alive to the circumstances of place. Having collected thousands of oyster shells from regional restaurants, and dyeing them the red of an important Lenape manuscript, Dustina Sherbine installed the shells at a local bookstore, Riverfront Green Park, and a disused industrial building on Water Street. In the same building, in an otherwise empty room, Eleanor King composed the rallying slogan “No Justice, No Peace” in mirroring backward-and-forward upper case letters, sober and emphatic, along three walls. On the building’s brick facade, Owen Hunter hung panels bearing local garbage he had salvaged, and Phumelele Tshabalala large drawn portraits of local inhabitants. Up the road, Lydia Goldbeck built a tiny cemetery of miniature, slightly drooping tombstones. Teke Cocina staged a pop-up store of fake memorabilia related to a meterorite strike in the town in 1992. Sarah Hewitt and Michael Barraco participated in a group show at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art: Hewitt with her mixed-medium sculptures, fiber and ceramic, that feel like streetwise fetishes; and Barraco with a video interviewing actress/comedian Geri Jewell, star of a 1980s television series that took place in a fictionalized Peekskill. Barraco flew all the way to LA to tape Jewell, who suffers from cerebral palsy and has become an activist for people with disabilities.

From start to finish, they have shown an openness to new ways of making. Hewitt arrived at Purchase with an already sophisticated practice that tended toward a subdued palette and serious tone; suddenly neon and metallic yarns appeared in her mainly woven pieces, and a spirit of deep play colored her profound mystical strain. First semester, Cocina tossed a common wallet on the floor filled with silkscreened replicas of license and credit cards, playfully doubling his own identity; the following year his ambitions expanded to queer identity in general as he created large wall-and-floor mounted replicas of tumbling male Renaissance nudes. King created 18-foot-tall wall paintings in “dazzle” camouflage in the college’s Maass Gallery in fall 2014, then, a year later, a powerful text piece in the windows reading “Don’t say you did not know it was coming,” a reprimand that felt apt in light of current political hate speech. Year one, Sherbine staged a performance in which she and a collaborator were administered shocks by visitors; the next year, in a crystalline documentary video, she traversed her neighborhood in upper Manhattan, through gentrified blocks and graffiti-splashed tunnels, recording the voices of inhabitants.

Goldbeck arrived making large figural drawings and shifted to precariously balanced plaster, canvas and concrete sculptures, at once spooky and whimsical, that tease the edges of death and eroticism. Tshabalala has abandoned, for now, the studied woodcut practice that he brought to Purchase, turning to experimental monotypes and lithographs that allow him to more freely express his deep sense of injustice at circumstances both here and in his home country of South Africa. Hunter has ranged from graphic novels to agglomerated soap sculpture, from cardboard drawings filling his studio floor to a single large canvas of seemingly random, peeling blue tape; in all cases, he has resisted monumentality and finish. Baracco fashions each project in response to the circumstances of its creation: be it the famously long word from the opening of Finnegans Wake cast in neon and permanently installed in a long walkway on the campus’s main mall, or ghostly images of honeybees and dead birds appearing and disappearing in a one-way mirror, or an ingenious stop-action animation of hundreds of rubbings of the grave of Winsor McKay (1869-1934), pioneer animator and cartoonist.

Throughout their time together, these students have been unstintingly generous with each other, with the undergraduates they have taught, and with faculty and visiting artists.

To each other they lent emotional and material support; to those who taught them, a rare enthusiasm and energy both in the making of work and the framing of a discourse around it. In an art world that can at times feel alienating, a strong cohort can provide a lasting sense of belonging, even after its members leave the place where they met. I have no doubt these eight students will continue to support each other in the future, making their own art world within the larger one that spins around them.

Faye Hirsch is Associate Professor and MFA Coordinator, Art+Design, Purchase College, SUNY.

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ACCI DENTS INTO INCI DENTS

The School of Art+Design, part of the School of the Arts at Purchase College, SUNY, offers premiere programs that prepare students for careers in the visual arts and design, as well as lives informed by aesthetic experience. The school honors tradition, encourages experimentation and collaboration, develops critical thinking, and embraces new concepts, materials and technologies. A faculty of working artists is committed to creating a supportive climate in which students are passionate about learning to see, to think, to make and to reflect. Our graduates are leaders in cultural production throughout the world.

The MFA Program at the School of Art+Design is a two year interdisciplinary graduate program in Visual Arts. The small and highly selective program fosters the artistic, intellectual and professional growth of each student through exposure to a variety of viewpoints represented by faculty, visiting artists and critics, and through independent studio work and academic studies. The individual studio practice of each student is essential to the program. Through the use of a semi-private studio, along with state-ofthe-art facilities, each graduate is expected to produce a body of work during their two years in residence.

School of the Arts productions and exhibitions are made possible in part through the generous support of: An Anonymous Foundation The Emily and Eugene Grant Fund for Music Performance and Presentation The Emily Grant Opera Performance and Production Fund Friends of Dance Friends of Music H & R Richmond The James A MacDonald Foundation Fund for Student Production The Jandon Foundation The L. Werlinich Dance Production Endowment The L. Werlinich Design/Technology Fund The L. Werlinich Opera Production Endowment The Morris & Dorothy Rubinoff Foundation PepsiCo Inc. The Peter Jay Sharp Endowed Fund for the School of the Arts Purchase College Foundation Richard and Dolly Maass Visual Arts Endowed Fund Robert and Sherry Wiener Fund for Theatre Production School of the Arts Gala Fund The Shirley and Royal Durst School of the Arts Endowed Fund The Westchester Community Foundation Windgate Charitable Foundation

School of the Arts School of Art+Design 735 Anderson Hill Road Purchase, NY 10577

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