January 7–30, 2016

Lee Asahina, Andrew Douglas Campbell, Chelsea Couch, Mandy Hampton, Ron Linn, Joe Moore, Mary Margaret Morgan, Meril Wallace, Esther Weng

The 2016 UO Art MFA 2nd Year Exhibition presents the work of nine MFA students in their 2nd year of Candidacy.

“An idea danced is an idea deteriorating in the process of being revealed, changed, getting caught up in the world, mucked-up and mitigated: that is, it’s improved.”*

If there was a common thread running through the work of these artists, it was that each refused expected responses to subject-object relationships, and each artist mediated these relationships vis-à-vis surprising and experimental processes and use of materials, often conveying the aspiration of one medium through the voice of another, sometimes returning again and again to the same idea with widely varying responses. Collage, video, ceramics, drawing, sculptural bricolage, puppetry and painting were all presented under an umbrella of exploration whose imperative seems to be a continual upending of viewer expectation. There was a momentum in each artist’s practice, represented in this exhibition by works that index highly discursive and energetic artistic activity, hinting at both the temporal nature of an artist’s labor, as well as the enduring visual and conceptual momentum that occurs as the result.