Half Tilt Full Lean - MFA Thesis Exhibition

This is an Archive of a Past Event

This group exhibition, curated by Enrique Chagoya, features the thesis artwork of five graduating MFA artists.

Michael Bartalos’s latest wall installation, Phase Transition, was created by cutting long, two-inch strips of Mylar that were then draped into loops and hung from clear dowels, giving the viewer the impression of dripping water.  The Mylar, with its metallic sheen that sways lightly in the wind of passersby, reflects brilliant shades of green, blue, and red on the wall, facilitated by the colored gels in flood lights that shine on the Mylar from their bird’s eye view in the gallery.  Inspired by a 2011 Nature magazine graph that tracked the extent of Arctic sea ice over the last 1,450 years, Phase Transition, through its artistic translation of scientific data, is an exploration of material, light and reflectivity.

An Atlanta, Georgia native, Galen Jackson strives to create symbolic systems and cosmologies that can function autonomously once set in motion.  At the epicenter of his practice is video, and in his current work, a three-part series showcasing the life, research, and world of a revered wheat scientist named L. Mordecai Spinards, Jackson employs security camera footage capturing men in white suits tending to rows of chemically injected wheat in Spinards’s underground bunker.  Jackson’s additional pieces in the series give the viewer an inside look into Spinards’s personal life.

Eleanor Oakes’s work explores the nature of human interactions and perceptions, particularly through issues of time, loss, and memory.  Oakes is drawn to places where past, present, presence, and absence intertwine, as she believes it is in these locations where the possibility of our interactions leaving a lasting impression seem to present themselves.  In her work Residual Loop, 2013 - present, the viewer sees a series of large format photographs with each piece displaying draped cloth in muted shades of yellow and green.  The fabric, a typical backdrop one wouldemploy under a bowl of fruit or vase of flowers for a still life portrait, is all that remains -burned, wrinkled, and stained. In the absence of additional subject matter, the cloth becomes the focus, and suggests that we, the viewers, have missed something…but what?

Sitting atop an oversized pedestal painted in whisper white, Ben Peterson’s small architectural sculptures draw visitors closer. Each standing no more than 20 inches high, the modest army of coarse, gray sculptures initially mislead the viewer into thinking that they are concrete, and not, in fact, their native material, ceramic, which has been fired and painted to simulate concrete.  Peterson’s sculptures give anod to Soviet Constructivist architecture and military fortifications, featuring sharp angles and planes, and tunneled openings that invite the viewer to take a closer look inside.  The shapes are familiar, some of the forms even resemble man’s best friend, but all are uniquely distinctive while remaining unified.

Anja Ulfeldt explores interdisciplinary and experiential art forms, and her latest performable object, Domestic Infrastructure #2, spans the back wall of the Art Gallery. A simple network of cast iron drainpipesweave themselvesup the walland connectto a hand pump on the floor.  The system is activatedwhen a usermovesthe handle, and the more rigorous theuserswings the pump handle, the more water builds up in the system.  The buildup’s frenzied release through joints in the pipes emit gurgling and bubbling sounds, which are captured by microphones imbedded in the pipes and projected by the attached audio system.