Lossless: CMU MFA Exhibition

"One of the most challenging, yet exciting aspects of art education is encouraging risks and accepting unpredictability. These three artists certainly embrace that ethos. For this culminating exhibition of their three year MFA, they are all exploring new territory. An inventor of kinetic mechanical metal machines decides to go multi-sensual. A sculptor recycling post-industrial waste creates a ritualistic performance for an immersive video experience. A videographer concerned with the perceptual relationship between the virtual and the real, delves into the psychology of the quotidian.

The MFA program at Carnegie Mellon University is a life changing journey, where assumptions and ideas are challenged and tested. It allows time for research, and reflection. There is no route map, and no one can predict the discoveries or outcomes of the experience. However the experience equips graduates with the skills, knowledge, awareness and commitment to succeed as independent artists and to be critical creative contributors in myriad cultural contexts. At this point of departure, I would like to congratulate Carl, Oreen and Yun Mi on their achievements at Carnegie Mellon, and wish them success for the future."

- John Carson
  Regina and Marlin Miller Professor, Head of the School of Art

Carl Bajandas

Carl Bajandas’ practice is directed by the act of discovery and the desire to create large scale poetic work. With each project, he employs entirely new production methods resulting in diverse works that contain thoughtful elements of levity and introspection. Loss / Recovery / Decay consists of a chemically unstable crystal color field that slowly shifts from blue to black; in reaction to this change, custom sound generation software creates a corresponding soundscape. This work explores entropy and our relationship to change.

Oreen Cohen

Oreen Cohen’s sculptural and video works stimulate poetic reflections in the built environment. As an observer and explorer, Cohen draws insight from her surroundings by unpacking the embedded meanings, histories, and identities of place. Urban interventions are created using metaphor and physical material to cultivate social allegories that re-interpret the past, solidify the present, and anticipate the future. The Video project, Between a Stone and a Shrine was supported in part by funding from the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye Fund For Art @ the Frontier.

Yunmi Her

Yunmi Her works with video-installation and interactive art to explore the daily internal conflict of individual lives. This is explored by examining environmental limitations, social systems, and relationships which help to construct individual identity. Yunmi Her’s videos depict recordings of incidental encounters as well as interviews with people about their everyday lives. Research, analysis, and observation are an important processes of her work. Contrary to this however, her video installations create a dreamlike ethereal mood that conveys not only the emptiness, loneliness, but also the hope, and satisfaction that occurs in the cycle of one’s daily life.