Master of Fine Arts Exhibitions : ACKLAND ART MUSEUM

	New Currents in Contemporary Art will be on display at the Ackland from April 13 through May 13. Each spring the Ackland Art Museum hosts New Currents in Contemporary Art, a thesis exhibition by Master of Fine Arts students at The University North Carolina at Chapel Hill. New Currents creates a bridge between two years of academic training and the wider audience of the Museum community. The final degree requirement is a body of work, artist's statement, and exhibition in the Ackland. In addition, each student must present an oral defense of their work to UNC-Chapel Hill studio faculty. For the past several years, this exhibition has been among the Ackland's best attended and this year, ten contemporary artists present over sixty works of art in New Currents in Contemporary Art. The artists — Maria Britton, Emily Cash, Sharon Lee Hart, David Huyck, Mildred Joyner Long, M.J. Sharp, Kristin Anne Thomsen, Montana Torrey, Izel Vargas, and Stacy-Lynn Waddell — work in a range of media including painting, drawing, photography, performance art, installation, and sculpture. The works address the full spectrum of contemporary issues, from identity, race, and nationality to investigations of gender and body image. The artists' works demonstrate traditional artistic concerns, but with a strong current of wit and comic sensibility. Traditional landscape and portraiture are updated by new media and modern points of view. As curator Chris Huber notes, "These artists are working with traditional subject matter in new ways and new media in traditional ways. They address the times we live in, and they have contemporary points of view, but the works resonate with art historical concerns." About the Artists Maria Britton appropriates vintage bed sheets as canvases, painting over and intensifying their hot pastel floral patterns. She evokes nostalgia for a past domesticity, but the memory is unsettling, even menacing. Some of the flowers seem to grin with cartoonish, caricatured lips, rich with thickly applied paint, while others seem to grow teeth. The busy, all-over quality of the painting and the punned titles — Hearty Hearty for a painting wearing a cascade of red hearts — recall the manic intensity of animated cartoons. Informed by the caustic comic strips of R. Crumb, Emily Cash investigates the inner workings of the human body as if it were a factory or a machine. Cash's highly detailed drawings (black pen on panel) map cells, muscles, and sinew with obsessive detail. Her drawings echo the excesses of twenty-first century consumer society, in which the constant flow of goods and information is paralleled by super-sized restaurant servings and super store offerings. Sharon Lee Hart straddles the ground between photographer and printmaker in the media of digital printmaking. Like the pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, she uses photographic transfer to appropriate images from popular culture or her own photographs. A pair of legs in high heels, two wolves, or an image of a traffic jam are transferred, replaced, combined with other images, or further manipulated into a new work. The consummate craftsperson, Hart is known for sensuous, high-quality papers, deep-toned, velvety blacks, and a wry commentary on contemporary gender hierarchies and inequities. Awed by recent natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the December 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, David Huyck is concerned with the power of nature over man, especially clouds, wind, and sky. For the exhibition, Huyck constructed a three dimensional environment of earth and sky that contrasts natural forms with manmade inventions such as the paper airplane — a stand in for weaponry. While the clean look of Huyck's environment is indebted to Japanese manga (comics) and anime (film), his witty sensibility engages serious issues of environmental disaster, violence, and war. Mildred Joyner Long finds poetry in the prosaic landscape around her hometown of Hillsborough, North Carolina. Her intense, perfected chromogenic photographs find beauty in the ordinary: traces of ephemeral footprints in dewy grass; the caress of rosy light over a bedspread; the ambiguity of a partial path in the woods. Carefully structuring her compositions in dialogue with the flat surface of the photograph, Long encourages her viewers to enjoy discovering her formal play. Another photographer, M.J. Sharp, delves into the mysteries of the night landscape. Sharp has recently returned from a trip to the American west where she was able to shoot low horizons and big skies with large negatives and long exposures. The resulting photographs capture wide bands of rich, atmospheric color, reminiscent of the color field paintings of Mark Rothko, with more than a hint of his spiritual mood. Painting portraits from photographs, Kristin Anne Thomsen transforms the brief photographic moment into the more encrusted time of painting. Thomsen reveals her processes, allowing bare canvas to show, drips to occur, and the layers of paint that define form to remain visible. In Hold, Thomsen's self-portrait with her grandmother, the grandmother slips in and out of representation, while the younger woman remains solid and grounded in what the artist calls "the present world." For her thesis project, Montana Torrey presents an art gallery on wheels that has traveled around Chapel Hill for the past year. Torrey inverts the traditional fixed position of the art gallery, allowing it to travel from neighborhood to neighborhood to find audiences. She solicits work from local artists. At the Ackland, viewers are invited to make drawings with color pencils provided in the gallery. Torrey will periodically make a selection of the drawings for a rotating display. Torrey's gallery will be accompanied by documentary photographs of its journeys, as well as photographs of other public art. Growing up in southern Texas a few miles from the Mexican border, Izel Vargas combines images from Latino, Hispanic, and Anglo popular culture to express the fragmentation of life on the border. Vargas explores issues such as immigration, assimilation, and how Latino/Hispanic people are represented in the media. Working in materials as hybrid as his culture, Vargas incorporates elements taken from border patrol manuals: game cards to teach Spanish; Catholic religious icons; and comics featuring Latino/Hispanic characters. Like his fellow students Emily Cash and David Huyck, Vargas uses a light touch to engage viewers in thorny contemporary issues. Stacy-Lynn Waddell imagines a landscape that specifically includes African Americans in the promises made by nineteenth-century landscape paintings: the blessings of the New World, especially the freedom to pursue dreams; the promise of shared riches of natural resources; and the promises of democracy overseen by a smiling providence. Inspired by the grand scale landscapes of second generation Hudson River School painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church, Waddell presents an eighteen-foot long canvas landscape. The canvas has collaged elements suggestive of abstracted mountains and other landscape features. Waddell further marks the canvas by burning, singeing, or branding it with branding irons in her own constellation of personal symbols. Like contemporary feminist theorists, such as Donna Harraway, Waddell claims the power to re-conceive

New Currents in Contemporary Art will be on display at the Ackland from April 13 through May 13.

Each spring the Ackland Art Museum hosts New Currents in Contemporary Art, a thesis exhibition by Master of Fine Arts students at The University North Carolina at Chapel Hill. New Currents creates a bridge between two years of academic training and the wider audience of the Museum community. The final degree requirement is a body of work, artist's statement, and exhibition in the Ackland. In addition, each student must present an oral defense of their work to UNC-Chapel Hill studio faculty. For the past several years, this exhibition has been among the Ackland's best attended and this year, ten contemporary artists present over sixty works of art in New Currents in Contemporary Art.

The artists — Maria Britton, Emily Cash, Sharon Lee Hart, David Huyck, Mildred Joyner Long, M.J. Sharp, Kristin Anne Thomsen, Montana Torrey, Izel Vargas, and Stacy-Lynn Waddell — work in a range of media including painting, drawing, photography, performance art, installation, and sculpture. The works address the full spectrum of contemporary issues, from identity, race, and nationality to investigations of gender and body image. The artists' works demonstrate traditional artistic concerns, but with a strong current of wit and comic sensibility. Traditional landscape and portraiture are updated by new media and modern points of view. As curator Chris Huber notes, "These artists are working with traditional subject matter in new ways and new media in traditional ways. They address the times we live in, and they have contemporary points of view, but the works resonate with art historical concerns."

About the Artists

Maria Britton appropriates vintage bed sheets as canvases, painting over and intensifying their hot pastel floral patterns. She evokes nostalgia for a past domesticity, but the memory is unsettling, even menacing. Some of the flowers seem to grin with cartoonish, caricatured lips, rich with thickly applied paint, while others seem to grow teeth. The busy, all-over quality of the painting and the punned titles — Hearty Hearty for a painting wearing a cascade of red hearts — recall the manic intensity of animated cartoons.

Informed by the caustic comic strips of R. Crumb, Emily Cash investigates the inner workings of the human body as if it were a factory or a machine. Cash's highly detailed drawings (black pen on panel) map cells, muscles, and sinew with obsessive detail. Her drawings echo the excesses of twenty-first century consumer society, in which the constant flow of goods and information is paralleled by super-sized restaurant servings and super store offerings.

Sharon Lee Hart straddles the ground between photographer and printmaker in the media of digital printmaking. Like the pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, she uses photographic transfer to appropriate images from popular culture or her own photographs. A pair of legs in high heels, two wolves, or an image of a traffic jam are transferred, replaced, combined with other images, or further manipulated into a new work. The consummate craftsperson, Hart is known for sensuous, high-quality papers, deep-toned, velvety blacks, and a wry commentary on contemporary gender hierarchies and inequities.

Awed by recent natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the December 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, David Huyck is concerned with the power of nature over man, especially clouds, wind, and sky. For the exhibition, Huyck constructed a three dimensional environment of earth and sky that contrasts natural forms with manmade inventions such as the paper airplane — a stand in for weaponry. While the clean look of Huyck's environment is indebted to Japanese manga (comics) and anime (film), his witty sensibility engages serious issues of environmental disaster, violence, and war.

Mildred Joyner Long finds poetry in the prosaic landscape around her hometown of Hillsborough, North Carolina. Her intense, perfected chromogenic photographs find beauty in the ordinary: traces of ephemeral footprints in dewy grass; the caress of rosy light over a bedspread; the ambiguity of a partial path in the woods. Carefully structuring her compositions in dialogue with the flat surface of the photograph, Long encourages her viewers to enjoy discovering her formal play.

Another photographer, M.J. Sharp, delves into the mysteries of the night landscape. Sharp has recently returned from a trip to the American west where she was able to shoot low horizons and big skies with large negatives and long exposures. The resulting photographs capture wide bands of rich, atmospheric color, reminiscent of the color field paintings of Mark Rothko, with more than a hint of his spiritual mood.

Painting portraits from photographs, Kristin Anne Thomsen transforms the brief photographic moment into the more encrusted time of painting. Thomsen reveals her processes, allowing bare canvas to show, drips to occur, and the layers of paint that define form to remain visible. In Hold, Thomsen's self-portrait with her grandmother, the grandmother slips in and out of representation, while the younger woman remains solid and grounded in what the artist calls "the present world."

For her thesis project, Montana Torrey presents an art gallery on wheels that has traveled around Chapel Hill for the past year. Torrey inverts the traditional fixed position of the art gallery, allowing it to travel from neighborhood to neighborhood to find audiences. She solicits work from local artists. At the Ackland, viewers are invited to make drawings with color pencils provided in the gallery. Torrey will periodically make a selection of the drawings for a rotating display. Torrey's gallery will be accompanied by documentary photographs of its journeys, as well as photographs of other public art.

Growing up in southern Texas a few miles from the Mexican border, Izel Vargas combines images from Latino, Hispanic, and Anglo popular culture to express the fragmentation of life on the border. Vargas explores issues such as immigration, assimilation, and how Latino/Hispanic people are represented in the media. Working in materials as hybrid as his culture, Vargas incorporates elements taken from border patrol manuals: game cards to teach Spanish; Catholic religious icons; and comics featuring Latino/Hispanic characters. Like his fellow students Emily Cash and David Huyck, Vargas uses a light touch to engage viewers in thorny contemporary issues.

Stacy-Lynn Waddell imagines a landscape that specifically includes African Americans in the promises made by nineteenth-century landscape paintings: the blessings of the New World, especially the freedom to pursue dreams; the promise of shared riches of natural resources; and the promises of democracy overseen by a smiling providence. Inspired by the grand scale landscapes of second generation Hudson River School painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church, Waddell presents an eighteen-foot long canvas landscape. The canvas has collaged elements suggestive of abstracted mountains and other landscape features. Waddell further marks the canvas by burning, singeing, or branding it with branding irons in her own constellation of personal symbols. Like contemporary feminist theorists, such as Donna Harraway, Waddell claims the power to re-conceive

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill