May 6–29, 2016
The University of Oregon 2016 UO Art MFA Thesis Exhibition was held at Disjecta and presented the culminating work of eight master of fine arts graduate students.
Anya Dikareva
St. Petersburg, Russia
BFA University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
I am a cannibal. I digest my own material by creating tangible and wearable objects, digitizing them through a camera and manipulating them on the screen, often taking still screenshots of moving images, then creating layer separations and rematerializing the flat image on a printed surface. Each generation of processing and translation creates a unique image, breaking through the shell of form and constraints of time, and provides material for future catabolic processes, settings and enactments.
Summer Gray
Atlanta, GA
BFA, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA
Combining traditional fibers techniques and new media, my work explores the inability to communicate experience, visually and through sound. Beginning with vocal recordings, I translate my personal experience with ongoing physical pain into a ten-part metaphor representing the scale doctor’s use to identify levels of pain. The recorded voices whisper through a set of ten ear buds, relentlessly overlapping one another, unable to be understood separately or in their entirety. This quiet cacophony of personal narrative is then mediated through a system of digital translations that allow experience to take on visual form. Images, 3d prints, and a quilted piece are all created through this system. Each form is generated from the form before it gaining complexity with each transformation. The square shape of the pieces draws a connection from the traditional quilt square and a history of women working their experience into quilted form and to the way we communicate experience in contemporary culture, through the digital square commonly seen in social media.
cargocollective.com/SummerGray
Krista Heinitz
Redwood City, California
BFA, Minnesota State University Mankato
This work responds to presence and absence of the built environment, the body, and information. Sites of introspection are explored through the spatial installation of collage, textile and sculpture. My work reflects a curious, explorative interaction with the world and its mundane objects. My studio practice is collage based; focused on accumulation and reassembling material ranging from the made to the found. Surfaces are marked with time and interaction, drawing from maps, blueprints, and architectural sketches.
Steven Joshlin
Blue Mountain, Mississippi
BFA in Photography, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS
Ise is a Shinto shrine in Japan. Every twenty years, it is torn down and an exact replica is rebuilt on an adjacent lot. The new shrine is not built with materials from the old but reconstituted with new materials, harvested from the local countryside. In the process a rupture of lineage occurs. What is left in its wake is the memory of something that existed long ago, continually reconstructed in an endless loop. My work lies in the heart of the rupture –– living the fantasy of nostalgia and memory only to have it continually rupture again and again in an unending cycle. It is about dreams and the echoes they leave behind, of another time and place, of an unrealized reality.
Daniel P. Lopez
LA HABRA, CA
BFA, Creative Photography, Minor Human Communication, California State University, Fullerton
Afternoon tea, agonophilia, Anubis, apophasis, armpits, baby carrots, baby dogs, baby food, beards, bears, bellies, boxing, bubble baths, burritos, butts, cacti, chocolate, cognitive dissonance, Craigslist, cuddles, dark ambient, Devil Daggers, flipphone, epiphanies, etc., fear, fetishes, Finnegans Wake, footy, friendship, fur, Gauge, gear, Get a Grip, gifties, gray-a, Growlr, Hairy Canary, Heavy Bullets, holding hands, I haven't a thing to wear, I wanna be a firetruck when I grow up, I wanna be a kid when I grow up, life, love, Love, Lovely Planet, Man Zoo, math rock, naughty bits, necessity, oversharing, PB+banana+chocolate chip sandwiches, peanut butter, pizza, PMA, potty mouth, puppies, puppies in bubbles, puppies made of sugar and dreams, Relationship Anarchy, rules, Saturday, Scruff, self-improvement, serotonin, sharing, Silly Hat vs. Egale Hat, speedos, squishes, Sugar Ray, Summer Movies, Super Hexagon, This damn ass rock, THPS, watersports, WarioWare, Whatz Ya Phone #, Woof Woof, wrestling, yoghurt+peanut butter+oatmeal+Frosted Mini Wheats, zentai.
Stephen Nachtigall
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
BFA, Sculpture, Alberta College of Art + Design
Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to art making; including video, sculpture, 2D work and installation, Stephen Nachtigall’s practice explores intersections of ecology, technology and culture through mimesis and simulation. Gestures of artifice and camouflage are evoked through the application of printed surfaces and woven mesh screens. Flatscreen monitors display 3D modeled plant forms that sway and stretch through the use of animation software. The shifting plant becomes an avatar or stand-in for an entity striving for it’s own agency in a climate where image and surface often become a primary avowal of identity. Nachtigall’s artwork considers the way in which we relate to things like plants from a mediated perspective, ultimately seeking an equitable relationship between human and non-human.
Rachel Widomski
Canfield, Ohio
BFA Summa Cum Laude, With Distinction in Art, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
There is a symphony in the streets of the city, muffled by our earbuds, cloaked in the function of arriving rather than pausing in the examination of the moment. We traverse the illusion of our everyday lives unaware of the sound our body produces as it makes contact with the earth. Noise drowns out the opportunity for exploration of the ambient.
Boredom is underrated.
Potentiality is my obsession. I value the immanent life, the one that exists veiled in our quotidian –– latent moments and esoteric concussions that reverberate in a concealed milieu. I can't help but dissect these and attempt to reveal their inherent capacity.
