Stamps 2014 MFA Thesis Exhibitions

MFA 2014 GRADUATE THESIS EXHIBITION

Ann Bartges

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Mia Cinelli

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Molly Valentine Dierks

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Parisa Ghaderi

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John Gutoskey

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Juliet Hinely

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Peter Leix

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Rolando Palacio

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Katie St. Clair

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Ann Bartges Holding Still is a video installation and live performance that explores relationships between memory, photography, time, representation and the separation between self and image. I pull from old family photos and home videos, and consider how they serve our desire to capture time. It is not my intention to present these artifacts as windows into a nostalgia-riddled past; instead, I consider these time-locked images as objects to be reckoned with in the present. I work through gestures that simultaneously challenge and benefit from the possibility of a “frozen moment.�

Presenting myself as author and character, I search for ways to resuscitate the media remnants left behind. Holding Still is comprised of four parts: a + A, Ann & Video Ann, Blink and Our Hands. Each one of these four works informs and creates a context for the others, and together they build a larger story.

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Holding Still 2014 Installation view

Holding Still (Ann & Video Ann) 2014 Video projection played on loop and performance Video duration: 00:12:12, performance space: 72” x 96” Projection screen: 52” x 84”

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Holding Still (a + A) 2014 Video projection played on loop, video duration: 00:11:25 Projection screen: 36” x 19”

Holding Still (Blink) 2014 Zoetrope, live feed video projection and looping performance

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Holding Still (Blink) 2014 Zoetrope, live feed video projection and looping performance

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Mia Cinelli When an event is experienced, a memory forms as proteins in the brain. When this event is remembered, those proteins reconstruct themselves, changing the memory slightly, influenced by imagination, present knowledge, and third-party input. Each recollection changes the most recent protein; the original is gone forever.

In Reconstructing Recollection, I reconstruct my memories physically and mentally. My memories appear in my mind as they have always been—clear and correct—though I know this cannot be true. I only recognize their lack of clarity when I begin to make them from memory.

The pristine, perfect memories I treasure do not exist perfectly anywhere; they are as incomplete and inaccurate as the sculptures I create.

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Best friend / back door, 2007 2014 Installation view, detail

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First cigar on concrete stoop, 2007 2014 Bookboard, paper tape, epoxy 45” x 46” x 65”

First cigar on concrete stoop, 2007 2014 Detail image

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Best friend/back door, 2007

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2014 Galvanized steel wire, duct tape, fiberglass, Teflon tape, organza, latex, tissue paper, muslin, thread 60” x 30” x 72”

Kitchen cabinet, 2009 2014 Steel wire, cheesecloth, Epsom salt, Teflon tape, thread 49” x 22” x 24”

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Molly Valentine Dierks Our bodies are the vehicles through which we reassert out identity through repeated performances. Within each performance, as within each relationship we nurture, complex layers are constantly shifting, revealing, covering, reinforcing or denying our fullest expression of ourselves. I approached each sculpture in home/Body as a metaphor for a relationship; between self and other, mother and daughter, and subject and object.

The form of the sculptures address binaries that tug at one another without finding a middle ground. Fusions, growths, and fragile but enduring connections suggest intimacy and oppression, pain and pleasure, choice and coercion. Recombinations and manipulations confuse the constructed with the natural. In home/Body, I am fundamentally questioning how much of who I am is a performance, and which aspects of my relationship to my identity, as to others, are supportive versus binding.

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home/body 2014 Installation View 15’ x 15’

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Ingrown 2014 High heels, glue, plastic, paint

Tools 2014 Cast porcelain, ink, glaze

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Double Bind 2013-2014 Scissors, lipstick, forks, needles

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Parisa Ghaderi My work is about the distance created by compounded loss, and the opacity of language. Through video, photography, looping images and audio installation, I explore moments of pause that are filled with vulnerability, silence and contradiction.

I am fascinated by the human face and the silence in portraiture, because the face has complicated our idea of identity and rootedness.

Video gives me the pleasure of being in control of time and duration of every single moment. Unlike in my real life, I can hold, slow down or rewind moments to show yearning for moments to last. Also, the moving image is a great metaphor for ongoing experiences of loss and grieving. There is no beginning and end, and you are left with the continuity of that moment, holding onto memories of loved ones when they leave, momentarily and forever.

Pieces in Only an Inch Away are part of a fragmented narrative about personal and communal loss and geographical and emotional distance, by creating a realistic illusion of presence.

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The sheer presence 2014 Installation view, detail

The Sheer Presence 2014 Black and white print on voile 4 ft. x 9 ft. (each)

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The Sheer Presence 2014 Detail

Keep calm 2014 Cinemagraph, 39� flat screen display mounted vertically on wall in a darkened room

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De.Tach.Ment 2014 Three-channel color video projection on 4 ft. x 8 ft. wall in a darkened space

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John Gutoskey I have infused my studio practice with the ideas and concepts of queer theory, inventing ways I might start to apply or combine what I was reading with my work in the multi layered media of assemblage, collage, installation and printmaking. I have been exploring the concepts of identity and gender--especially queerness--through autobiography.

My most recent project, Shaman Johnny’s Pop-Up Shop & Gallery, was an installation in downtown Ann Arbor storefront that further explored and visualized the concepts of queer theory and my explorations into queering objects and space. I created a queer or alternative persona, Shaman Johnny, based on my own life experiences a a gay man, artist, mediator, and healer who inhabited Shaman Johnny’s Pop-Up Shop & Gallery. I installed a queer pop-up shop and gallery which was filled with my original print work, a self-produced line of Shaman Johnny healing products, and a line of queer products for the home which were based on my queer prints. I also built a working digital photo booth.

As an artist, I am experimenting with and developing a poetics and aesthetics of queerness within the very public realm of the visual arts, and contributing to a dialog that is in its early stages.

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Photo strip portraits of visitors taken in Shaman Johnny’s Photo booth 2014

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Shaman Johnny’s 5 Star product line 2014

Shaman Johnny sitting with a visitor in front of the “Reliquary of Protection” in the meditation area 2014

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Left to right: Halo, 3 mandalas and statues with the Table of Crowns.

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Juliet Hinely Hear now their then was a non-linear self-guided sound installation and listening tour of the Jam Handy building in Detroit, Michigan, on view in March 2014.

Visitors walked into the large, dimly lit main space of the building to discover 12 audio vignettes through a series of theatrically illuminated headphone speakers hanging down into the space. At each station, listeners drew the speakers to the their ears and became immersed in a soundscape and story particular to that spot in the building’s history.

Some narrations oriented the listener to notice a particular feature of the building, while others began in the midst of an event in the building’s past. Listeners might find themselves in the crowd at a property auction, in the audience at a live-broadcast of the evangelical television show in the early 1980s, or swept up into the hubbub of the 1940s film set. Other vignettes refer to stories related to the building that take the listener watching skywriting airplanes or standing on the beach at night.

The compositions range from 1-3 minutes long and play on a loop.

The tour as a whole has no beginning, middle, or end, but each audio vignette has its own small story arc. The stories of the space accumulate as listeners step from spot to spot.

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Here now then their 2014 Installation view

Listeners at the installation 2014

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Listeners at the installation 2014

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Peter Leix For my thesis I made a feature length documentary about my family and friends in the town of Flint Michigan. What started as a series of vignettes ended up growing to encompass a whole group of people that shared the goal of making Flint a better place. Flint’s problems will not be solved for a very long time. However, the individuals in my film are fiercely dedicated to moving the city forward, inch by inch, person by person.

I truly consider the people that choose to stay in Flint and help the undeserved heroic. My aim with this film was to capture the daily lives, struggles and triumphs of these heroes

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Wander 2014 16 x 9, film still

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Watchful Eyes 2013 16 x 9, An abandoned building with the images of MLK and Malcom X, Ironically the bars are pried open on the window.

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David and Damingo 2013 This image is of David and Domingo Berlanga, two of the subjects of my film standing in front of the community center they are working on.

Refuge 2014 16 x 9 A image of the interior of the Dye’s home, it’s warmth and quiet feel seem representative of me of how I see the house.

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Rolando Palacio Una Vida Linda is a series about the different Latino/a generations that inhabit the area of Southwest Detroit, which is also known as Mexican Town. This series is a portrait into the lives of a changing demographic of the Midwest. Culturally I am trying to express the hybridity of the Latino culture existent in Detroit along with the structural violence that is apparent in this area.

Structural violence is described as an invisible mechanism that has no physical actor but has the potential to harm individuals by limiting their basic needs. It can be institutionalized through gender, race and class.

Then images created were reflective towards the people’s personal spaces they created for themselves.

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Untitled 2014 Transparency film scanned 44” x 55”

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Untitled 2013 Digital Photography 44” x 66”

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Untitled 2013 Digital Photography, 44” x 66”

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Untitled 2013 Digital Photography, 44” x 55”

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Katie St. Clair On close investigation, my immense landscape paintings are fractured combinations of complex layers of paint, collage material, and photographs that reflect upon the current state of the natural world. My installations, created from discarded material I have collected from the roadside, drainage ditches, and land between buildings, sprawl out into the gallery and extend the space of these paintings.

Whether on foot or bike, the surrounding environment guides my investigations in the studio. The slow pace and physical awareness of these spaces is visible when being self-propelled, allowing me to take notice of the environment. I can quickly dismount from a bike or take pause from a walk to take photographs, and gather other forms of documentation while immersed in nature and roadside debris. This process of sensory experience and documentation is heightened when exploring a new cityscape or a rural country road.

In my studio, I use these materials to transform the emotional experience of being in a new environment into a tangible form. As viewers explore the environments I create in the gallery, they become absorbed as spectators within the spectacle of my invented landscapes, traversing collages as they would a commonly ignored landscape next to the street. In this way, I can communicate my physical experience of crawling around in the brush, making connections between natural material and human refuse. The detritus brings the natural materials into focus by allowing us to make connections through form. This relationship builds associations between the objects, especially when they exist side by side. The trash amplifies nature and nature amplifies trash, but they both resolve in the same way: decay.

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Loor 2013 Acrylic and photo collage on panel 54” x 45”

Phich, Phoss and Grust 2014 Acrylic and photo collage on loose canvas 144” x 96” (each)

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Photo of canvas beneath ice spheres during the melt

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Walow 2014 Ice spheres melting

About the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan: The Stamps School offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees in art and design.

The School’s unique open curriculum emphasizes interdisciplinary study, requires international educational experiences, fosters community engagement, and draws on the resources only available at a top-ten research university.

Regents of the University of Michigan: Mark J. Bernstein, Julia Donovan Darlow, Laurence B. Deitch, Shauna Ryder Diggs, Denise Ilitch, Andrea Fischer Newman, Andrew C. Richner, Katherine E. White, Mark S. Schlissel, ex officio. Š 2013 Regents of the University of Michigan.

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Design: Parisa Ghaderi Director of the program: David Chung

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