Visual Arts 2017 MFA Thesis Exhibition Published on the occasion of the 2017 Columbia University 4 From the Curator 122 From the Dean School of the Arts Visual Arts Program MFA Thesis 122 From the Chair The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery 6 Joeun Aatchim 125 About the Curator Lenfest Center for the Arts 10 Michal Alpern 126 Appendix April 23–May 21 14 Dana Buhl Pera Lern 18 Lucy Lord Campana © 2017 The artists and Columbia University 22 Andrew Cannon 26 Nash Glynn Columbia University 30 Maggie Goldstone 310 Dodge Hall, MC 1806 34 Allison Janae Hamilton 2960 Broadway 38 Taylor Ashby Hawkins New York, NY 10027 42 Duy Hoàng arts.columbia.edu/visual-arts 46 iris yirei hu 50 Juntae TeeJay Hwang Design: 54 Kim Junsung L+L (Brooklyn , NY) 58 Peter LaBier 62 Alex Mctigue Typeface: 66 Julia Medyńska Acumin Pro 70 Cy Morgan 74 Rocío Olivares 78 Jenna Basso Pietrobon 82 Adam Liam Rose 86 Emily Ludwig Shafer 90 Lynn Spanke 94 Sara Stern 98 Dylan Vandenhoeck 102 Kristin Walsh 106 Derick Whitson 110 Bryan McGovern Wilson 114 Zou Zhao (Xi Xi) 118 José Delgado Zúñiga March 12, 2017 Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s 1998 El Mexterminator at El Museo del Barrio, New York, was a life-changing, emotional event. I had just started working at the museum the year before. I helped Dear Graduating Artists, plan and create the dense installation, assist the artists, docented the per for mances, and responded to audience and staf as they I wound up being a curator for very simplistic reasons. I’ve always reacted to the work’s challenging, retro-futuristic, ethno-cyborg loved art: its power to move us. The right image, word, sound— characters. It was both extremely dificult and very, very enriching. speaks to our concerns and captures the very spirit of the moment. I can conjure the taste of Teresa Margolles’ 2002 Vaporization I’ll confess I’m really not sure where my passion comes from. at PS1. She filled a gallery with fog created from water used It wasn’t in my family. As a child, I spent hours copying parts of to wash corpses in Mexico City’s morgue. I can hear Janet Cardif Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms from an oversized book. In high whispering in my ear from Her Long Black Hair, 2004, a Public Art school, I broke away from a class trip to New York to stand before Fund walk in Central Park accompanied by a Walkman and packet Monet’s Water Lilies at MoMA, thrilling to the luminous surface. of photographs. Nostalgia? Perhaps. I could keep going. There After moving to New York City, I was exposed to a much wider are so many art-going memories from various points over my life range. The East Village of the early 1980s was flooded by grafiti and of which I have excellent recall. They stirred my heart, moved me, neo-expressionist painting, and enflamed by the AIDS pandemic. and continue to feel very connected to me because they were It was a hotbed of aggressive, literate perfor mance, art, music, and of my time. social activism. At 2 am in 8BC, the short-lived after-hours club, You, too, are of your time. Each of you hails from a diferent cor - Karen Finley stood on a cofee table just a few feet away and ner of the world, and carries your own distinct constellation: your deliv ered a sing-song litany about a mother drowning her babies. language, approach, materials, influences, concerns, poli tics, and No one knew who she was, but we couldn’t take our eyes of passions. Gathered here together, it may seem a cacophonous of her. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sue Coe, Juan Sánchez, and David symphony, but it’s a beautiful snapshot of the state of the moment. Wojnarowicz were producing the impassioned, feverish imagery We’ll see that some day. that spoke directly to us, to our times. We saw them in our neigh- I know it’s a dificult moment. Change is scary and exhil a rat ing, borhood, talked to them at gallery openings or Exit Art, and read and the world seems poised on the brink of madness. But keep critiques in the Village Voice or East Village Eye. going. Someday you, like me, will have dificulty dis tilling your I travelled a bit, then I went to graduate school. I worked in a Soho hunger for contemporary art to 500 words. And then you, cofee bar and a printmaking studio. I was floored by the pre ci sion too, will know as I do that we are living rich and fortunate lives. and wit of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms spiraling around the Guggenheim ramp during her 1989 retrospective. The 1994 Felix Gonzalez-Torres retrospective at the Hirshhorn, in Washington, DC, with its optimistic Sincerely, light bulb strings, shimmering silver-wrapped candy carpet, and the indoor billboard installation of soaring birds was heartbreaking, Deborah Cullen presented right in the belly of governmental negligence. Curator 4 5 Joeun Aatchim Aatchim (b. 1989) crafts a visual form (below) of writing borrowed from the literary In Praise of Cry Breaks (울음휴식예찬 · 哭泣休息禮讚), 2016 Artist talk / live reading performance; (props) two diction in Essayism. To gratify her MacBook Pros, hand-crafted cardboard Apple MacBook agonizing yearn for crafting intangible with LED light, printed paper script, aroma vaporizers “coincidences” as her medium, she (rose flavor E-cigarette), and Perrier sparkling water; vigorously, yet steadily, executes (performers) Carla Rhodes aka Cecil Sinclaire (right), Mary Boo Anderson (left), and Kathryn Kendall multimedia craft, such as mosaics, 17 minutes ceramics, drawing, and print making as proxies. In her artist talk perfor mance with dubbing and ventriloquism, she illogically recounts the relationship between the artist and his/her work, provoking queries about authorship, disembodiment, and the sincerity of voice. She received her BFA in Studio Art from New York University. Currently, she is working on her never-ending manuscript, Four (of) Mattresses Stacked on Misery. www.joeun-aatchim.com 6 7 Joeun Aatchim Draft: Sans Self, 2016 Tumbled marbles, ceramic, smalti glass, flexible urethane, mortar, hydraulic cement, ∑mail (AKA SapphoMail), 2016 resin, epoxy, fiberglass, foam, watercolor, moss, nylon, neoprene, sand, and moss Multimedia installation 39.7″ × 24″ × 2″ Installation size variable Michal Alpern Michal Alpern (b. 1986 / Haifa, Israel) “To lift yourself out of a miserable BFA Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, state—even by vigorous force—should Jerusalem. Lives and works in Tel Aviv be easy. I tear myself of the chair, stride and New York. around the table, exercise my head and neck, bring fire to my eyes, flex the muscles around them. Defy any emotion, I would welcome A. enthusiastically, if he comes to see me now; amiably tolerate B., swallow in long draughts everything that is said at C.’s, despite the pain and trouble. But even if that were to happen, one mistake, that is unavoidable, will stop it all, light and heavy alike, it will withdraw around and around in a circle. Hence the best advice is to endure all, to make yourself an inert mass, even that you feel, you are a leaf in the wind, to regard your fellow man with an animal gaze, to feel no compunction, in short with your own hands throttle down any remnant of life —that ghostly remains in you, that is, to increase the final peace, the grave-like rest, and let nothing exist but that. A characteristic gesture in such a state is to run your little finger over your eyebrows.” — Resolutions, Franz Kafka 10 11 Michal Alpern Studio practice, 2015 Drywall, silver chain, hot rolled steel, SaveAs, 2016 Form to matter, Matter to form, 2016 5 attempts at a table, 2016 and acrylic house paint Digital image Urethane rubber Variable 10′ × 15′ × 15′ (room); 60″ × 18″ × 26″ (bench) Variable dimensions 144″ × 85″ × 24″ approx. 26″ × 20″ × 4″ each Dana Buhl (b. 1986 / The Valley of the Sun) “One must rid oneself of the delusion BFA in Photography, that it is the major events which have Arizona State University the most decisive influence on people. They are much more deeply and danabuhl.info continuously influenced by the tiny catastrophes which make up daily life.” — The Salaried Masses, Siegfried Kracauer 14 15 Dana Buhl Excerpt from The Optimism of the Grid, 2016–2017 Inkjet prints Dimensions variable Lucy Lord Campana Lucy Lord Campana (b. Boston, MA) habits of the original craftworkers that no received her BFA from the Rhode Island amount of armchair theorizing can give.” School of Design. Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool We can see farther than ever before. Painted Black by Cookie Mueller (p. 85): The edges of our collective vision are not “After these trips we came back in and limited to our own eyes, but rather to images looked around like maniacs. We looked at that are presented to us through many the walls. All the paintings were hanging layers of subjectivity. Culture is infused into there waiting. We went into instant art panic. each layer, deter mining what we choose to It was getting dangerously late to be in the see and the visual language to communicate house, the roof was about to fall. it. Painting weaves these layers together, ‘THIS ARTIST IS MORE FAMOUS!’ Howard frozen gestures lay side by side, creating yanked a painting of the wall. a representation of what we observe. ‘BUT THIS ONE’S WORTH MORE!’ In a kindergarten alphabet book, for the I grabbed another. We hadn’t much time.