CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The School of Art and Design Master of Fine Arts Exhibition will show the culmination of three years of work by 10 graduate students in art and design.
The MFA Exhibition opens at Krannert Art Museum with a public reception from 5-7 p.m. Saturday, April 9. The exhibition runs through April 23. The students whose work is featured will earn their MFA in a range of disciplines, from industrial design, metals and photography to painting, sculpture and new media.
“The diversity of work on view in this year’s exhibition, both in terms of subject matter and material processes, reveals a lot about our MFA programs,” said Ryan Griffis, a professor of new media and the associate director of graduate studies for the School of Art and Design. “Our location within a public research university encourages both experimentation and deep investigation, and the work of these artists and designers exemplifies that.”
Jess Kiel-Wornson’s performative sculpture explores the power of quiet, everyday traumas, and how domestic spaces impact our behaviors and interactions.
Her installation at the MFA show, titled “The Archive of Disagreeable Women,” features three rooms she’s constructed in the gallery. Their stories “have quietly leaned far enough into the wallpaper as to become one with it. They have become invisible in their ubiquity,” she wrote in her artist statement.
The rooms in the exhibition include a bathroom, in which Kiel-Wornson considers women who have committed murder and “how tidy women tend to be in their acts of violence. I’m interested in the expression of control within this act of chaos.”
The bedroom scene reflects on the archetype of the exhausted mother. “One thinks of the bedroom as a sort of space of peace and safety. This is a space of heightened anxiety where all your thoughts come to the foreground,” Kiel-Wornson said.
The kitchen considers interactions between women, perhaps sisters, and how they negotiate multigenerational relationships with each other.
The viewer must enter each room in order to experience it – by crawling under the kitchen table, climbing stairs to peer over a wall into the bathroom or lying on the bed.
Jina Seo works with metals, leather and 3-D printing to create unconventional forms from wearable objects.
She is interested in desire as an elemental part of human nature, and she uses clothing as a way to look at the desires of power, beauty and wealth. She is also interested in the empty spaces in clothing that is not being worn.
“When the body is removed, the absence becomes evidence of it, and the internal structures remain full of its authentic spirit and fantasy,” she wrote in her artist statement.
Seo likes working with material, deconstructing and reconstructing it into symbolic forms.
“It is a process of investigating the moments when ordinary objects become surreal and uncanny,” she said.
She described her work as similar to Kongo nail fetishes – carved figures driven with nails that are used to summon spiritual forces.
“They believed that material has its own power,” Seo said of the people who made the figures. “It becomes sort of like a shamanistic process, to bring energy to something else.”
James Wisdom paints surreal images of figures within grand landscapes. He is interested in how politics, power, belief and resistance are represented.
“My art practice is based on the invention of fantastical narratives illustrated through illusionistic images,” Wisdom wrote in his artist statement.
The five large-scale paintings Wisdom has created for the exhibition are “illustrations for a story that’s never been told.”
He said the paintings are of a contrived epic narrative with imaginary life forms. Wisdom said he makes artwork that is informed by the history of painting, religious imagery and contemporary allegorical pop-surrealism.
While he is inventing the forms he’s using to tell his stories, it is important to him that his work is accessible to many people and that he works in a visual language that can be simply understood.
“I’m trying to find a balance between telling stories and being comfortable with the nature of the images I’m making,” Wisdom said. “I’m trying to combine representational approaches and conceptualism into something that is interesting to different audiences for different reasons.”