Next Friday is the 2019 MFA Exhibition at San Francisco Art Institute! Fifty emerging artists will open their studios and transform SFAI—Fort Mason Campus into a large-scale gallery, theater and performance space full of multi-media installations, sculptures, contemporary art films, paintings, prints, photography, performances, and more.
To give you a sense of what’s in store for visitors, let us introduce you to ten SFAI MFA students who will be exhibiting work May 17–27!
Tune in next week for another preview, and don’t forget to join us to celebrate the opening of the exhibition on May 17th during the public opening, or May 16th at Vernissage for an exclusive VIP Preview!
Ans Li
“My paintings and installations contain bright colors as well as materials from childhood. Under a cheerful surface, my work discusses issues that I am concerned about—such as gender inequality and cultural conflict—as a Chinese woman living in the United States. I highlight the importance of interaction and multiple senses, asking the viewer to become a participant in the work by allowing their senses (sight, taste, smell, and touch) to be engaged.”
Anthony Chao
“This work explores the relationship between the splendid beauty of the undeveloped, rural, ancient landscapes and stunning ancient architecture in 安徽 Anhui Province, China, and the brilliant artistic craft that has passed its prime in history.”
Ben Cornish
“My current body of work acts as unsure timelines of mistakes and anomalies. The tensioned narratives that governed my childhood were spoken with a certainty that could only be argued back in a kind storytelling steeped in repentance. I choose to speak in image. Bosch made paintings for the dungeons, I make images for houses that are filled with arguments and quiet anxiousness hidden for oneself from an environment built of allegory and alibi.“
Guiliana Funkhouser
“I’m interested in meeting the Wizard, how about you? My artwork interrogates contemporary mass-media entertainment and “content delivery” platforms that promise instant connection while fragmenting reality in unprecedented ways. By presenting the darkly Babylonian aspects of weaponized narrative and social media interactions through photo and sound art installations, I hope to celebrate the people and places continually pushed to the wayside in the name of technological acceleration, economic expansion, and the siren song of paradise.“
Haley Toyama
“I dedicate my energy to preserving memories of the city I love. I treat my practice as one of the remaining ways to criticize the neo-imperialism of the mainland Chinese government acting under the guise of British postcolonialism in Hong Kong.“
John James Hartford V
“Through a destructive process, exhumed works are constructed of both collected material and found objects that resonate with personal traumas, memories, or appeal to the aestheticized destroyed object. My work guides the viewer’s attention to the visual object’s (or icon’s) sediments of time and decay—in what I’ve come to describe as “post-opulence”—and aims to reveal the contemporary mimesis of twice-removed truths surrounding greater bloom and decay.“
Joshua Mintz
“Through the act of stitching fractured, yet interdependent, moments in time, my work explores themes of memory and the displacement of the human psyche experienced through the wonted events of ordinary life. Sculptural and illustrative, the miniature environment, combined with the imitative inclusion of banal objects, becomes a door to the uncanny. These cross sections, extracted from a complex story line, present the viewer with ignored moments of everyday life, frozen to invite stillness and contemplation.“
Katie Curry
“These works are subject to the liminal: a convergence of opposites where line becomes form, where the two-dimensional verges on the sculptural, where desire and conscious thought intersect. Forms give way to recognizable imagery in the guise of domestic goods and desert landscapes, often flirting with the figurative.“
Leigh Daniels
“Using non-archival and semi-photographic processes, time and human interaction encourage inevitable destruction. I create camera-less exposures, using both light-sensitive and natural materials such as cyanotype and turmeric or beets and sun. Welcoming the materials to flow freely, I remove myself and enable the moment I have created to live and decay naturally. I strive to bring visibility and beauty to what society and the art world deem easy to dismiss.“
Sami Cutrona
“Often revealing the subject through fragments, I am interested in the ability to maintain agency through abstraction. I utilize photo-based works as a means of reclaiming bodily autonomy and disrupting the ways in which power and meaning have been inscribed on my queer abject body. While considering the art historical canon, I seek to reject its traditions. I do not directly allude to my identity—allowing room for gender ambiguity and, ultimately, agency.“
