Original Information:
Reception
Saturday | May 7 | 6-8pm
This annual exhibition is an opportunity to sample an array of current directions in contemporary art, fresh from the studios of practicing professional artists who are completing MFA degrees in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University. The participating artists work in Painting and Drawing, Performance, Sculpture, Photography, Ceramics, Printmaking, Art+Technology, Video, Sound, and varied combinations of these media. Come see what each artist brings to this diverse and dynamic presentation at the OSU Urban Arts Space.
Confluence(s) is curated by Sarah Rogers, whose experience includes roles at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Wexner Center for the Arts and COSI. Currently, Rogers is vice president of Advancement & Communications for the performing arts organization CAPA.
This exhibition is cosponsored by the Department of Art and the College of Arts and Sciences, and supported by the John Fergus Family Fund.
Artists
- Susana Alvarez
- Jessie Blackmer
- Nick Bontrager
- Undine Brod
- Joshua Cloud
- Virginia Colwell
- Clare Fox
- Florence Gouvrit
- George T. Gregory Jr.
- Rachel Heberling
- Brooke Hunter-Lombardi
- Emi Inoue
- Yoshinaga Kawamura
- Ash Kyrie
- Robert Paul Lewis
- Ashley Moore
- Philmore Peterson
- Zachary Podgorny
- Tara Polansky
- Stephanie Brooke West
- Lauren Whearty
While creating her MFA Thesis project, Lauren Whearty believed that the learned sense of “taste” when it came to art limited progress and growth. She strove to challenge this” through an unnatural aesthetic of color and texture” stating that “the practice of painting allows, me to accomplish the ultimate inclusion of my most disparate inspirations, which involve fashion, music, that which is organic, the commercial and popular, and that which may be sentimental.”
Today, Whearty lives and works in Philadelphia. During the last few years she has exhibited at the Woodmere Museum of Art, The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Vox Populi, and Bridgette Mayer Galleries and many more. She has also taught at The Ohio State University, the Tyler School of Art & Architecture (Temple University), University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pa, and Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. She has also been a Co-Director at Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist run nonprofit curatorial collective in Brooklyn, NY, since 2017.
Zachary Podgorny’s birth name is Zachar Vaks, and written in Cyrillic letters it looks like 3axap Bakc and in his thesis project, he investigated the idea of taking on different artistic styles and personas with different names he has been given. 3axap, whose work is featured here, is a painter who makes oil paintings on linen, canvas, paper, window curtains, shower curtains, and dry wall.
Philmore Peterson V described his 2011 MFA Thesis project as consisting of pieces that become a “shape-shifting puzzle.” He wrote that, “These dynamic constructions are like the colors of a chameleon’s skin, always changing and adapting to blend into their ever-changing surroundings or circumstances.”
Today, he is a painter and mixed media artist living and working in Dallas, Texas. His work is included in the collections of Dupree Gallery (Philadelphia) and has also been featured in Columbus Alive, Rolling Out Magazine, & UWeekly, having exhibited in Dallas, Philadelphia, Columbus, Chicago, and New York City.
Writing about his thesis project, Robert Lewis said, “This year I began to record, edit, and mix languages and sounds into abstract compositions. This kind of sound composition is known as musique concrète. While making this work, I have been thinking about isolation, transparency, eavesdropping, observation, and the overall misinterpretation of familiar sounds.”
Yoshinaga Kawamura’s thesis project sought to investigate the potential of different materials and was strongly inspired by his observations of his natural environment alongside architecture.
During her time as an MFA student, Brooke Hunter Lombardi began raising silkworms, and they slowly became a large part of her practice, leading to this piece, Caterpillar House, which by placing the insects within domestic spaces, aims to invoke a sense of wonder, creating places that resemble daydreams.
Virginia Colwell used inspiration from her father, a former FBI agent, to create her MFA Thesis project called His Archive which includes the pictured piece The Desk. Colwell’s work investigates questions about judgement, justice, empathy, and power in relation to criminal investigations. Colwell is still exhibiting today and was had works exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Art in Lithuania, the Hirschorn Museum in the United States, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, and the Centro Cultural Félix Varela during the 12th Havana Biennial to name a few.
This piece, The Queen’s Dog is one of a few that Undine Brod exhibited during the 2011 MFA Thesis Show. Speaking about this thesis project, Brod wrote, “Through my work, I attempt to find ways to decipher and understand what is around me in a world of oddities and awkwardness.”
Susana Alvarez used this project Corrupted Transmissions to investigate her relationship with memory by creating memory maps. She used pictures from throughout her life to “manipulate memories, recreate and reinterpret the environments” that have surrounded her.
Nick Bontrager was one of the artist who exhibited in our 2011 MFA Thesis Show. Bontrager was always interested in film, and his work focused on the idea of film as both an object and a structure. Speaking about this piece, Intermission, Bontrager wrote, “Through my built structures, I generate missing elements to answer my questions. I re-create the cinematic as three dimensional elements and in this way, materialize my imagination of what was happening just off screen or “missing” in some other way.” He received his MFA from The Ohio State University for studies in Art & Technology and his BFA at the University of Houston in Photography & Digital Media. His artwork has been exhibited internationally in film festivals, museums, and galleries. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of New Media Art at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.
