3.14.2013

Compound Vision - Mills College 2013 Thesis Exhibition



The Mills College Art Museum announces Compound Vision, the thesis exhibition for the 2013 Master of Fine Arts degree recipients, on view May 4–May 26, 2013. 



If art is an imitation of life, then Evan Barbour's work mimics a hybrid life, where specimens get mashed up and revitalized as miniature sculptures. Though fictitious, these amalgamations are neither so bizarre nor complex as actual microorganisms hiding in plain sight. The closer we look, the deeper our surroundings become.




Claire Colette works in drawing, painting and sculpture to create works that reflect omnipresent repetitive patterns. Studying sun flares and nuclear blasts, the seismic wave patterns of a volcano and a heartbeat monitor, she searches for an unnamed or undefined order; an underlying physics existing both materially and metaphysically. 



Lauren Douglas works with photography and installation to explore ideas about how we perceive reality and how we operate within the constraints of the space-time continuum.  Utilizing the practice of intensified looking her images hover between the familiar and the extraordinary as she examines how we understand and participate with time.   




Keegan Luttrell's work explores psychological responses to thrill and fear. She layers destructive undertones with collective recreational activities.  This duality considers the underlying principles of what attracts one to the adrenaline 
rush, while at the same examining the state of vulnerability in moments of turmoil.



Nadja Eulee Miller works in sculpture, performance and collaboration.  Her work examines how rituals facilitate interaction through a given framework of trust.  



Barbara Obata .I. Work. .II. Working to be human. .III. Grasp materials.  Manipulate.  Ferment, produce, extrude.  Exhaustion. .IV. Uniqueness nags -- turns out the soul is more malleable than originally described -- or so current studies indicate.   Again: manipulate.  Ferment, produce, extrude.  Exhaustion.  Work.  Working to be human.


Meri Page creates landscapes that call into question the authentic and artificial, reality and fantasy. Working with cyanotype, sand, salt, and raw pigments, the meticulously crafted environments reference satellite views, crystalline structures, and geologic and geographic forms, inviting shifts of perception and questions of our place in the physical universe.  



Simon Pyle explores the reductions and noise inherent in visual technologies of representation.  Through a focus on visual loss, the work considers what is discarded in a world dominated by representation and simulacra.


Jenny Sharaf explores the mythology of the California blonde.  Strongly influenced by the folklore of cinema history and the vernacular of L.A., she investigates the female's relationship to the camera as it pertains to contemporary feminism.  


Kate Short explores states of unrest through the juxtaposition of conflicting elements. Whether through imposed intimacy or deceptive seduction, Kate's work weaves together space, light, sound, and commodified objects to challenge the viewer to be the ultimate arbiter of their experience.

Katy Warner studies the human desire to find logic in an overwhelming reality.  Using giant chalkboards, video collage, found objects and performance, she explores the obsessive need to create complex systems which are often integral to the lives of individuals who cannot cope with reality as it is.

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12.04.2012

ASCENT - Fundraising Art Sale - December 20th at Incline Gallery

A one night sale of unique art to benefit the upcoming Mills MFA show for the Class of 2013. Please join us for this special event, and in the process help us make our Thesis Exhibition the best it can be. There will be refreshments and the artists will be there to discuss their work.


About the Incline Gallery:
http://inclinegallerysf.com/welcome/
https://www.facebook.com/inclinegallerysf

An unusual series of ramps and volumes is transformed into the Incline space, a new San Francisco contemporary art gallery. Incline Gallery seeks to offer a nurturing platform and a solid support system for emerging Bay Area visual and performative artists.
By reaching out to these artists, curators, and the public at large, Incline Gallery opens the doors to an inspirational and experimental place of growth and community building.


Hours:

11.19.2012

Open Studios Fall 2012


The time has arrived for the Graduate Art Department to open it's doors to the public!
Please join us on Sunday, December 9th for a chance to get a sneak-peak of our work.
Refreshments will be provided and parking is always free on campus

9.18.2012

Upcoming Lectures This Year

September 13    DesirĂ©e Holman

Lisser Theater    
DesirĂ©e Holman is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist. Holman manipulates figurative props and costumes in role-playing scenarios to ask what games of make-believe can tell us about our behaviors in the ‘real’ world. Holman was awarded the 2008 San Francisco Modern Museum of Art SECA award and a 2007 Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue award. In 2011, her second solo museum exhibition opened in the Berkeley Art Museum’s MATRIX program.

September 19   Abelardo Morell     

Danforth Lecture Hall
Best known for installing and photographing camera obscuras, Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948 and immigrated to the United States at the age of 14. He has received a number of awards and grants, including a Guggenheim fellowship in 1994. Among his many books are a photographic illustration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and a collaboration with the designer Ted Muehling and neurologist Oliver Sacks. A retrospective of his work organized jointly by the Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty, and The High Museum in Atlanta will be on view starting in the summer of 2013.

October 10    John Chiara

Danforth Lecture Hall (changed from Littlefield Concert Hall)  
Chiara photographs cityscapes in a process that is part photography, part event and part sculpture – an undertaking in apparatus and patience.  Many times this process involves composing pictures from the inside of a large hand-built camera mounted on a flatbed trailer to produce large scale, one-of-a-kind, positive exposures. A native Californian who lives and works in San Francisco, Chiara has produced work focused on Bay Area landmarks, including Lands End, Lime Point, and Point Bonita.

October  30    Michael Robinson

Danforth Lecture Hall
Michael Robinson is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and the dangers of mediated experience.  Cultivating new resonances between seemingly disparate elements, his collaged films ride the fine lines between humor and terror, nostalgia and contempt, ecstasy and hysteria. He was listed as one of the top ten avant-garde filmmakers of the 2000's by Film Comment magazine and featured as one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” by Cinema Scope magazine.

November 5    Greil Marcus

Jay DeFeo and all that Jazz
Lisser Theatre     
Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces, The Dustbin of History, Mystery Train, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, The Old, Weird America, and most recently The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years.  With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America, published by Harvard University Press in 2009.  He lives in Oakland.

November 14    Melissa E. Feldman

Danforth Lecture Hall    
Melissa E. Feldman is an independent curator and critic who writes regularly for Art in America and frieze. Feldman is the guest curator of the exhibition Dance Rehearsal: Karen Klimnik's World of Ballet and Theater at the Mills College Art Museum. Recent projects include the traveling exhibition Afterglow: Rethinking California Light and Space Art, The Life and Times of Sarah McEneaney at Mills College Art Museum, and Sampler: Textiles at Creative Growth at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland.


Lectures made possible with generous support from the Herringer Family Foundation, Jane Green Endowment for Studies in Art History and Criticism, and the LEF Foundation.

All lectures are free and open to the public.