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MFA SPOTLIGHT

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College

Annandale-On-Hudson

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents the Class of 2022 thesis presentation titled close alternative. Bringing together works by candidates in the disciplines film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing, close alternative was on view from July 17 through July 25 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook, New York.

close alternative, the title of this year’s thesis exhibition was conceived from the graduating class’ shared hopes, desires, vulnerabilities, and anxieties. The hope to share space with one another again; the desire to prioritize accessibility, vulnerability, and compromise; and the eagerness to unlearn and redefine what (un)productivity for an artist can mean, look, or sound like. In a way, this loose thread also points to the various adaptive shifts artists must often (un)make in their practice.

The exhibition was coordinated by Shehab (Isis) Awad  MA’17, a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). Shehab (Isis) Awad is a writer and curator from Cairo living in New York City. He/she operates as Executive Care*, an all-encompassing self-as-agency at the service of artists.

Aristilde Kirby, from Gate: Forever In Debt To Your Priceless Advice, 2021, black trans femme body, playboy bunny suit, red heels, Tibetan melong medallion, severed tree branch, artificial rose, natural rose, leather eyepatch, rubber black viper, tri-partite plywood frame spraypainted black, iPhone flashlight, 3.5 years of scholastic & interpersonal strife, altered script from the end of the game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, wiffle bat & ball, poems, generic sports bag, generic foldout table, large dressing screen, purple plant light, captive excitable audience, toy guns, toy ammunition, Bito Hall at scenic Bard College in Red Hook, New York, USA, World, Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, Universe.

Aristilde Kirby

Aristilde Kirby (she/they, b. 1991) is a poet, like the play of the ripples on the water. Daisy & Catherine², her latest chapbook, is out in October via Auric Press. Past works include Daisy & Catherine (Belladonna, 2017) & Sonnet Infinitesimal / Material Girl (Black Warrior Review & Best American Experimental Writing 2020). She has a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing from Bard College. You can just call her Aris, like Paris without the P.

The segment inside Gate was called Shadow Install: Fission Mailed. It was a nacreization of a lot of warped matters I was forced to struggle against in my time at school. It was a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses (including for profit institutions), events & incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead or actual events is purely coincidental & comorbid.

Edythe Woolley, Holding (Sighs), 2021, red and yellow beetroots, yellow glazed ceramic pipes, yellow glazed ceramic latches, spray painted inflatable mattresses, yellow and green construction rope, black carabinas rope cleats rope loops, cream red and off yellow clothes, a long red string. Video piece 1.43 minute loop. Installation altered by 3 × 20 minute performances.

Edythe Woolley

Edythe Woolley is a performance artist from the UK living and working in Queens, NYC.

Edythe’s transdisciplinary practice traverses multiple mediums, including video, drawing and sculpture to create performance and installation. Their research-based process is led by curiosity. Working somatically, Edythe feels through the body, following proprioceptive feedback loops queering form and space. Using both found and self-made objects, Edythe’s practice considers neuro-diverse thinking patterns to create radical landscapes of feelings that blur the hierarchy between human bodies and objecthood.

Making through conversation and collaboration is an important part of Edythe’s practice. Edythe has taught workshops in universities and schools across the UK and they were a Teaching Fellow at Al-Quds Bard College, Palestine (2021).

Edythe graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts from Bard College New York and holds a Bachelor Degree in English Literature and Performance with honors from Queen Mary University London (2015).

Wibke Tiarks, CURVED, 2021, Bluetooth Speaker, Microphone, Loop Stations, 8 channel player.

Wibke Tiarks

My work deals with sonic space in the form of a system of relationships that can change, shift, and readjust, a system of listening that can take on such tasks as mis-remembering and reconfiguring. In this sonic space, sound takes over a room in the form of leaking, even including a leak of sense that registers forms of knowledge that are not synched, but are partial, sketchy, liquid and animate. The sounds I produce are enmeshed with instances of liveliness.

Along these lines, I explore the idea of space as a composition in which all objects act as instruments, and a score is drawn from performing their relations. In using post production techniques during my performances, such as dubbing, lip synching or recording, my intention is to pressure past the barriers of known and categorical audio genres, to go beyond the romantic.

Katz Tepper

Katz Tepper is an interdisciplinary artist whose work casts an inward gaze to reflect on environmentally scaled situations, concerned with entanglements that dissolve boundaries between internal and external. Their recent video work yolks the potential of remote communication to insist on a pliable relationship to spatial and temporal distance. Using words as images, they posit that linguistic description and storytelling unsettle certain ideas of image-making, questioning what it means to see something, and where else in the body such witnessing and transmission can take place.

Solo presentations of their work include White Columns, NY and Atlanta Contemporary, GA. Tepper was born in Florida in 1987 and is now based in Athens, GA. They are a recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award and a MacDowell Fellowship. They earned a BFA from the Cooper Union and an MFA from Bard College.

katyatepper.com

Geneva Skeen

Geneva Skeen is an artist and composer. Influenced by écriture féminine, alchemical metaphors, and a range of musical traditions ranging from holy mysticism to industrial, Skeen works with sound, voice, architecture, video, sculpture, and software. Her recordings, performances, publications, and installations focus on site-specific landscape studies as a means to highlight complex interdependencies between perception, attention, and trauma. Through linkages made between our finite physical landscapes and their infinitely permutable digital representations, these works explore qualities of embodiment amidst climate catastrophe and late capitalism.

Skeen has released musical works on Room40, LINE Imprint, Touch, Dragon’s Eye Recordings, and Crystalline Morphologies, which have been reviewed in The Wire Magazine, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, Foxy Digitalis, and others. She has presented work at LAXART, the Broad Museum, Open Space SFMOMA, LAND AND SEA, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Center for New Music San Francisco, REDCAT, and LACMA. She is curator/founder of Sequencing, an online transmedia publication series for Fulcrum Arts which explores the intersection of art and science, and is a member of VOLUME, a curatorial collective focused on sound and time-based practices. She is currently Adjunct Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Andrea Sisson, Untitled Video, 2021, 9 minute loop.

Andrea Sisson

Andrea Sisson is an interdisciplinary artist living in Los Angeles (b. Cincinnati, Ohio). They are a 2010 J. William Fulbright Fellow. Their thesis includes a video installation and an essay. The video excerpt is a visual exploration using the camera and other material means to try and “figure out” what happened to her family after her brother went to live in a mental healthcare correctional facility in Ohio eight years ago. The work explores memory and eventually, the longer-form film will look at the carcerality of the mental healthcare system and the ways it affects people and the families within it. The essay excerpt writes about how conversations and learning collaborations, current psychological research (or lack thereof), and creative exchange including music, has helped themself and others in their community recover from PTSD, while simultaneously providing a critical analysis of the mental healthcare industry.

Shaheen Qureshi, In my loneliness your memories are my companion, what am I to do, something is happening, 2021, single-channel video, grandmother’s headscarves, ceramic dog statue with drawings from early childhood.

Shaheen Qureshi

The text that is read over the video is a series of letters to a fugitive to whom I am distantly but personally connected through my mother. The letters, which are part of a book-length manuscript, aim to blur the line between fantasy and reality, explore and unravel complex intimacies and lineages, and chart the emotional terrain of living in a racialized body.

Shaheen Qureshi is a Filipina-Pakistani American writer, editor, and educator. Her interdisciplinary work seeks to excavate postcolonial identity through research of family and personal archives. Her work has appeared in Pinsapo Press and Changes Review, and she is the recipient of fellowships from Studios at MASS MoCA and Caldera Arts. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and is the co-curator of the reading series Here I am Again.

shaheenqureshi.com

Sarah Passino, Avoid Glancing Blows, 2021.

Sarah Passino

Sarah Passino is a poet and bookmaker whose work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, DIAGRAM, Berkeley Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, Poetry Daily, Boston Review’s What Nature, Wendy’s Subway’s Capital and Ritual, Company Gallery, and elsewhere. Her first poetry book, Versioning Sappho Versioning, came out in 2021 with Stereoverse Editions. Her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Poet’s House, The Center for Book Arts, and by the 92nd Street Y’s Rachel Wetzsteon Poetry Prize.

rahul nair, your emotional labor will bear fruit, 2021. Photo: Christopher Baliwas.

Rahul Nair

Rahul Nair (he/they) is an Indian-American interdisciplinary drummer, musician, composer, performance artist, and installation artist. He worked as an assistant for Non-Event, performed as a solo artist for Mobius Artist Group, played in the experimental heavy band wiles and designed the interdisciplinary project fatal oscillation. They bought their BM in composition at Berklee College of Music and MFA in Music/Sound at Bard MFA.

Beaux Mendes, Pinyon Jay, 2021, scagliola (plaster, hide glue, pigment) on wood panel, 18 × 24".

Beaux Mendes

Dani Lessnau, feeding fireflies, Fertile Ruins, 2021, midnight blue & blue/black pâte de verre glass.

Dani Lessnau

Dani Lessnau engages in a ritual hyper-sensitization practice, embracing her own body as a medium in constant relationship. Through somatic and healing performances, as well as object based work, these practices open her to collaboration with both the material and the immaterial, solid and unseen.  Glass and the photographic apparatus usher light in as a playmate, while glass, wool and silk give rise to an exchange between heat and warmth.  Interested in complicating habits of conventional perception, Lessnau leans into spaces where what seem to be paradoxes enfold and re-shape one another.  The alien and the familiar; the tender and the erotic; the specific and the abstract; the strong and the vulnerable, all translate and mutate, giving birth to a new fluid foundation.

She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Andrew Lee, The Subjunctive Mood or The Syncretic Agora of the Song, 2021, (detail), steel, copper conduit, quartz glass, argon, mercury, gator clips, arakawa mounts, aircraft cable, 120 volts, dimensions variable. Image courtesy the artist and Bard MFA Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Andrew Lee

Andrew Lee is an artist whose work encompasses sound, video, drawing, photography, sculpture and installation.

Recent presentations include Achtung Cinema Paris, France (2019), Kinoskop International Analog Film Festival, Belgrade, Serbia (2019), Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan (2020), Radio Alhara, Bethlehem (2021) and NARS Foundation, New York (2021).

andrewleestudio.com

Samuel Breslin

Samuel Nathan Breslin (b. 1987, San Francisco) is a writer and visual artist whose work deals with intimacy, desire, love, and types of touch. His writing explores the linguistic dynamics of relationships in dialogue, as well as the physicality and sensations that accompany them, lingering on the intimate commonalities of contact (skin, cotton, love, shame, etc.) as well as the boundaries and habitats within which our desires take place (walls, windows, denim pants, friendship, the self, California sunshine, etc). Samuel’s performance and installation work projects character onto inanimate objects: lamps illuminated in time with dialogue have an unexpected sexual encounter with one another on a pier at night, house plants spot lit from above discuss the possibility and appropriateness of talking to other people at the gym.

@samuel_nathan_breslin

Valerie Hsiung, from The Naif, 2021, poetry.

Valerie Hsiung

Valerie Hsiung is a poet, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and the author of several poetry and hybrid writing collections, including To love an artist (Essay Press, forthcoming), selected by Renee Gladman for the 2020 Essay Press Book Prize, hummingbird et partygirl (Essay Press, forthcoming), outside voices, please (CSU, 2021), Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners, 2020), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books, 2020), and e f g (Action, 2016). Her work can be found in places such as The Nation, The Believer, New Delta Review, The Adroit Journal, Black Sun Lit, The Rumpus, Chicago Review, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, and beyond. She has performed at Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project, Poetic Research Bureau, and Shapeshifter Lab, and her writing has been commissioned by Montez Press Radio, Hyle Greece, and Downs & Ross.

Claudette Gacuti

Corbin Ferguson

corbinferguson.com

MJ Daines, subspace interference, 2021, , thrifted cotton sweaters, steel.

MJ Daines

MJ Daines is an artist and researcher living in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal. Using contemporary tools and thrifted materials, she re-imagines ancient technologies and communication strategies, interpreting the ways in which people adapt and innovate from manual to mechanical to digital to whatever comes next. She holds certification in textile analysis from the Centre International d’Etude des Textiles Anciens (Lyon, France), in computerized jacquard weaving from the Centre des Textiles Contemporains de Montréal and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. She is currently a lecturer in Visual Arts at Princeton University.

Sophie Tusler Byerley, Untitled, 2021, each 15 × 17", cyanotype and gum bichromate on paper.

Sophie Tusler Byerley

Sophie Tusler Byerley lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work employs an expanded notion of photographic capture in order to create visual histories that are empathetic to their subjects - through uncertainty, layering processes, shifting color tones and textures. She uses nineteenth century printing processes to produce images that are always in flux. Their tone and density change based on the weather, the humidity of the air, and the temperature and minerality of the water. In her work, the moment of capture loses its centrality, giving way to layers of decisions concerning paper, sizing, individually chosen pigments, and the tonal range and contrast of analog printing processes.

Rev. William Ellis Bradley, memory pup cluster a, 2021, from the installation a song, by two memory pup clusters, five memory pups, one acoustic ear, alligator clips, solar charged lithium polymer batteries, hanging incubation lamp with LED daylight flood, 1/8" headphone rca cable, ambient room light, breath, shadows (moving and static).

Rev. William Ellis Bradley

Originally from Door County, Wisconsin, Rev. William Ellis Bradley (the steward, rev.web) moved to Kansas City in 2010 where they obtained their BFA (Sculpture, KCAI ’14) and formed the Sollus trio with ceramicist Joey Watson and producer/performer J Ashley Miller, which performs with William’s solar powered sollusflutes. In 2017, they returned to Door County where they directed the BEGIN series with percussionist Jon Mueller, during which time they obtained a Certificate from the Center for Deep Listening (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, ’18) and their MFA from the BardMFA (Music/Sound, ’22). They moved to Damariscotta, ME in 2021, where they listen for things, foster instruments that listen to other things, and compose their long-form albums of sunlight.

reverendwilliamellisbradley.com

Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta, Untitled III, 2021, cardboard, food-grade industrial lubricant, plywood, electronics.

Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta

Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta (b.1992, Sweden) is an interdisciplinary artist. Before her MFA at Bard she studied at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York and De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta’s work moves between her interest in infrastructures and up close observation of material relationships. She positions herself within sequences or procedures and confuses them, often isolating or redirecting elements into new configurations. With a sense of the bizarre, assigned logics within larger systems are at question.

Riel Bellow-Jackson

Christopher Baliwas, All Time, 2021, materials variable. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist.

Christopher Baliwas

Christopher Baliwas is a Filipino American interdisciplinary artist born in the Bay Area and based in Los Angeles. He is the eldest son of Jackie and Thor Baliwas, and a new father.  With the practice of photography as home, it is often taken over by other mediums of sound, sculpture, and writing. Baliwas’s work seeks for an altering of perception through the unspectacular, the rudimentary, and stories of family as an attempt to question time, site(sight) and ownership. Under the alias, reallynathan, Baliwas independently released the album “O” in 2020, which has served as a portal to develop his own(?) relationship to the concept of “All Time”.

christopherbaliwas.com

John Pike

John Pike is an image-based artist interested in where he belongs or doesn’t belong in the landscape. His current project, “Fishing and Photography with John Pike,” features a single-channel video and a light table displaying 6cm X 17cm panoramic slides on Fuji Velvia 50 film. In “Fishing and Photography with John Pike,” John attempts to teach an imagined audience how to fish and take photographs. In his ultimately failed instruction combined with long passages of flowing waterways, John implicates himself in how landscape photography and fishing preserve, maintain, and record a landscape but often serve to exploit and extract.

John Pike lives in Brooklyn and maintains connections to Los Angeles, Mexico City and Austin, Texas. John holds degrees from CalArts, The Mountain School for the Arts and Bard College.

pikepikepike.com

Lorenzo Bueno

Lorenzo Bueno is an American artist who was born in Argentina in 1991.

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