Exhibition

Basement Miracle: CMU MFA Exhibition

Duration

March 30, 2013 - April 21, 2013

Artists

Scott Andrew, Felipe Castelblanco, Craig Fahner, Steve Gurysh, Luke Loeffler, Dan Wilcox, Erin Womack

"They say that some people have gone into the basement of Carnegie Mellon’s Doherty Hall and never been seen again. It is a warren of twisting corridors and bewildering levels - a labyrinth of leftover spaces that no one seemed to know what to do with, until the art students arrived and made it their own. Just as artists renovate derelict buildings and revitalize areas of urban neglect, so the graduate students of the School of Art, over time, have turned the basement floors of Doherty into an incubator of incredible creative activity. In subterranean classrooms, workshops and studios, they have performed their alchemy - ingeniously transforming everyday materials, objects, and devices into extraordinary constructions, challenging propositions, outrageous performances, political statements, conceptual conundrums, and imaginative imagery.

Now, seven young artists are stepping into the light. Their work is presented for you in the 2013 MFA Thesis Exhibition. Behold the miracle of art."

- John Carson
Head of the School of Art + Regina and Marlin Miller Professor,
Carnegie Mellon University

Scott Andrew is half-crystal, half-human, with a league of tranny-child warriors at his beck and call. His interests include posthumanism, gender performativity, excess, and forms of masculinity. His environments generate confrontational and absurd immersive experiences with characters culled from parallel universes. His opulent fantasies draw from prelapsarian longing, fetish, and kitsch by recycling fashion, mythology, and items from his grandma's attic.

Scott Andrew, installation view at Miller ICA.

Felipe Castelblanco is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of social engagement, interactive art, and new media art. Through urban interventions, video, and networked installations, his work creates participatory experiences and coexistent (if sometimes contentious) encounters across vast distances. Felipe is currently developing a body of work that imagines air as a material embodiment of the public sphere.

Felipe Castelblanco, installation view at Miller ICA.

Craig Fahner is a sound and media artist from Calgary, Alberta. His work is centered on radical uses of media, creating clearings within technology to facilitate unlikely participatory experiences. He believes that ethical relationships to objects are formed through tactile encounters. In a world increasingly filled with invisible informational objects, Craig’s work transforms the immaterial into the perceptible, creating opportunities for critical play.

Craig Fahner, installation view at Miller ICA.

Steve Gurysh creates time-based and sculptural media that explore economies of energy, cycles of technological advancement and obsolescence, as well as sincere attempts to encounter the miraculous. By interlacing solitary expeditions with shared encounters, myth-making, and material science, his work invents a testing ground for abandoned pasts, alternative presents, and provocative futures.

Steve Gurysh, installation view at Miller ICA.

Luke Loeffler works with sculpture and code in response to the consumption, influence, and politics of personal technologies. His work explores the gap between our desires reflected through our tools and the disappointing reality they can unintentionally engender. Drawing on the past for methodological, material, and mystical inspiration, Luke creates systems that collide modern conditions with their historical counterparts, unveiling a relationship between man and tool that is timeless, complex, and paradoxical.

Luke Loeffler, installation view at Miller ICA.

Dan Wilcox is an astronaut. NASA and commercial space companies will send humans to Mars by the 2030s on what may be a one-way trip. Would you go? Dan spent two weeks on a simulated Mars mission in the Utah desert, experiencing the hardship and excitement of extra-planetary exploration as research for a concept album and astronaut rock opera, robotcowboy: Onward to Mars.

Dan Wilcox, installation view at Miller ICA.

Erin Womack creates multimedia artworks that embody a series of imagined worlds. Together they form a singular fantasy realm that serves as a framework for mapping consciousness and reflecting the chaos of the human experience. In this semblance of our own world, hierarchies are called into question, rational thinking is suspended, and the forces of nature reign supreme.

Erin Womack, installation view at Miller ICA.

The Drift, installation view at Miller ICA.