Graduate students to show MFA exhibition in Shaffer Art Building

After three years of work, pieces of art from masters of fine arts students are coming together in a collection of print, photography, film and even virtual reality.

Though these mediums seem very different, they will all be housed together in the annual MFA exhibition at the Syracuse University Art Galleries. The show, titled “MFA 2016: None the Wiser,” will have a soft opening Thursday and an opening reception on April 14. The exhibit runs through May 15.

The collection of works from 28 graduate students from the College of Visual and Performing Arts is housed in the Shaffer Art Building.

With such broad themes and mediums, it’s not a competition — it’s simply a showcase of the work the MFA students have turned out. Besides space, there’s no limit to what students can create, said collection and exhibition coordinator Emily Dittman.

This display comes after months — and for some, years — of planning. Dittman, along with SUArt Galleries Assistant Director Andrew Saluti, started getting project proposals from MFA students in October so they could prepare.

From there, students and organizers had studio visits and email conversations to make sure they were on track for this display.

Jacob Riddle, a transmedia graduate student, started working on his project two years ago. In it, he looks at the difference between “virtual and actual,” and breaks it down into a display of virtual reality and photographs.

Though he started planning a while ago, Riddle didn’t finalize his project until he could set it up in the gallery.

“I consistently am conscious of how I set up my work and not just the work itself,” Riddle said. “I wasn’t sure of what pieces I would include in the exhibit until after I knew the exact space I would be in.”

For graduate printmaking student Brent Erickson, preparing this project in advance wasn’t easy. He spent this semester doing a residency in Los Angeles, where he didn’t have access to a printmaking studio.

“I had to be creative in how I’d represent printmaking without making prints,” Erickson said.

He focused on the repetitive aspect of prints, displaying that through paper folding, video loops and repetitive drawings.

Meanwhile, MFA film student Alessia Cecchet took a less physical approach to her project. She created a film about an “Onikuma,” a bear-like creature found in Japanese mythology. She’s screening the film on the wall from one projector. Meanwhile, from a separate projector, it’ll be screened on the sculpture of a horse head covered in crochet.

“There is a big dialog between everything going on,” she said. “The viewer is required to come in and look at all the pieces and interpret the story between them.”

Stefan Zoller’s exhibit uses a medium viewers are more familiar with like paint, and presents it in a new way. Instead of just laying down acrylics on a canvas, he paints bridges and other lined structures. Zoller often uses tape, which he lifts away to define those lines.

Zoller said though it’s titled “Pulled Loose,” his work has the theme of “the presence of absence” — the feeling of lost loved ones. He derives this idea from the absence of his grandfather, whose architectural drawings inspire his work.

“For me these works are kind of a way of communicating with him,” Zoller said. “It’s the imprint of him that’s left, and I needed to do something with it.”

Even though the exhibit comes when these MFA students are graduating, it’s not the end of their research and work in the topics and mediums they explored.

“This is our thesis, but it’s not necessarily a bookend to our work,” Erickson said. “It’s more of a refinement of ideas and research we’ve been doing for three years.”

SU students will fill the SUArt galleries in more ways than just the MFA exhibit. There will also be two additional exhibits presented and curated by graduate and undergraduate students — “[Re] Framed: An Object’s Journey Into the Collections” and “Women, War, and a Changing World: Alan Dunn’s New Yorker Cartoons.”
Both of these exhibits will also open on Thursday, and can be found in the SUArt study galleries.