CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Graduate students in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Art and Design will present their work in an exhibition at Krannert Art Museum.
The annual School of Art and Design Master of Fine Arts Exhibition opens April 12 and runs through April 26. It includes 12 graduate students in studio art, industrial design and Design for Responsible Innovation. The work in the exhibition is the culmination of their graduate education.
Amy Applegate is an observational painter. Her MFA exhibition is an installation of 14 paintings designed in relation to one another and the space in which they were created. Applegate is interested in perception and the way framing and context affect how things are understood. Her works play with point of view, figure-ground and illusions of space through edge and color variation. Many of the paintings link through formal repetitions and inversions.
Applegate said all the paintings are representational but many are flexible enough to be perceived in different ways by their relationship to others in the room.
“The group and arrangement will complement and complicate the individual compositions,” she said.
Anieya Cauthen is a multidisciplinary artist with a primary focus on photography. Her work examines themes of mortality, memory, the passage of time and the role of the archive in memory making.
“meat sack?” consists of two self-portraits taken at a time when she was frustrated and unhappy with how she looked and is also a nod to an intimate portrait of her late grandmother. The piece is meant to feel like you’re seeing something you’re not supposed to see, as the images are intimate, domestic and revealing, Cauthen said.
Her work “i’ve never seen my grandma wear this jacket but it was hers” addresses the part of her grandmother’s life that was unknown to Cauthen. In the photograph, Cauthen, wearing her grandmother’s coat, faces away from the camera and toward darkness as if confronting her grandmother’s now unreachable past and the inevitability of death.
Sculptor Erica Fitzgerald explores material practice, feminine labor and the political erosion of women’s autonomy. Her textile work recalls the traditional practices of women weaving cloth together. She said the historical act of mending becomes a metaphor for strength, resilience and community.
Fitzgerald collaborated with the Women’s Resources Center on campus to organize two events where people worked together to repair rips in a 30-foot by 10-foot curtain. The work represents repairing the violence against and control of women’s bodies, she said.
Her other works in the show include a series of nonfunctional birthing stools that are either too high or low or have uneven legs, referencing how women are unsupported; a ripped up paper copy of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision tied onto copper that references medical instruments further points to women’s loss of bodily autonomy.
Quinn Koeneman is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes printmaking and self-published comic books. He is interested in outdated analog media, such as risograph printing, a mechanical form of reproduction that relies on stencils and ink application and that retains a handcrafted look. Koeneman said risographs are the kind of machines “you might find in church basements for making fliers.”
On display are risograph-printed images of his hand-drawn illustrations for “The Imminent,” a science fiction comic book series featuring a postapocalyptic story.
Also on view is Koeneman’s work “CMYK Walk in the Woods,” a risograph-printed stop-motion animation project recorded in VHS. The project recently was shown at the Marvels of Media Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City.
Koeneman is interested in accessibility, how we process information, the aesthetics of neurodiversity and autism advocacy. He will soon launch a risograph small press called Get Home Safe Press.
Joseph Obanubi creates visual collages of materials that include found images from personal and familiar archives, materials from thrift stores and garage sales, and digital fragments. He is interested in how we construct a sense of self through lived experience and familiarity, and how those identities continually change in periods of transition. His work reconstructs familiar ideas and everyday experiences by placing them into a new context.
His work “Of/by/for the Screen” is an immersive experience that uses screens as both a medium and metaphor of the site where identities are constructed and reassembled, just as his materials are reconfigured. The work uses negative film slides from various geographical spaces, projection mapping and moving images to create sensory engagement. Obanubi said that while much of his making process is digital, the physical process of creating and the use of tactile materials is important to him.
Obanubi said his work looks at power, autonomy and who has control of the production and dissemination of images.
Harsh Waichal is an industrial designer with a background in mechanical engineering. While working in engineering, he became intrigued with how the two disciplines could work together.
His thesis project looks at how medical casts could be redesigned with different materials that would promote better patient recovery. He was inspired by his grandmother, who had to wear a cast after a fall last year.
“Casts have not really evolved over time. Their basic function of immobility has not changed,” he said.
Waichal said his engineering skills helped him understand the manufacturing limitations for new products. He said the design aspect is more human-centered and takes into account the experience of the user, such as the emotions a person wearing a cast has regarding pain and limitation of movement.
Editor’s notes: More information about the School of Art and Design Master of Fine Arts Exhibition is available online. For information about Krannert Art Museum, contact Evelyn Shapiro at esha@illinois.edu.
