MFA Art Practice 2022 Thesis Exhibition
This Too Shall Pass
Van Der Plas Gallery
156 Orchard Street, New York City
Sunday - Wednesday 12pm - 5pm
Thursday - Saturday 12pm - 6pm
Reception July 20, 6pm - 9pm
MFA Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts is pleased to present “This Too Shall Pass,” an exhibition of the thesis work of the class of 2022. These six artists hailing from three continents began their studies online in the summer of 2020; some of them are meeting in person this summer for the first time, for the concluding semester of their graduate studies. Even as they were kept physically apart, pursuing their MFAs during these strange years gives them a unique commonality of experience. There is no recent experience was not shaped, directly or indirectly, by the pandemic. Private lives and public personae have bled together. A sense of urgency pervades our news feeds and cultural consumption. Impermanence reigns; new crises emerge even as their predecessors go unresolved. This, too, shall pass.
In a somewhat counterintuitive move, these six artists scratch at the borders of the perpetual now by leaning into the chaos and impermanence rather than fighting against it. Theodora Eliezer embraces the fluctuations and possibilities of nonlinear time and queer temporalities in Memory Salon, as participants recount their memories of a future work by the artist. Lisa Lee Freeman’s large-scale artworks on paper and canvas invite viewers to get lost in turbulent, map-like imagery, disrupting the hierarchies of cartography.
The subjects of Christianne Ebel’s two series, Being Pandemic Fine and Hair, explore how individuals are shaped by and shape external reality through visual narratives. The subjects of Juliet Walzer’s pencil portraits of the artist’s middle school students – melancholy yet humorously cropped – in their lonely zoom frames explore community and care in a time of alienation. India Lombardi-Bello traces meridian lines — according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, the paths through which energy moves through the body — as an intuitive exercise in the unformed and precarious territory between illness and health.
Fei Jia’s artificial womb serves no medical function — it cannot incubate life — but imagines a future in which it could and, in the meantime, encourages viewers to play with its material components. Conceived over the course of several months, it gains new resonance in the United States after the abrupt end of Roe. An era has, startlingly, passed.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog. A list of works is available here.
