Fall 2011 MFA Graduate Thesis Show

November 4, 2011 - November 17, 2011

The CU Art Museum and the Department of Art & Art History present the Fall 2011 Graduate Thesis Show, held in the Projects Gallery of the CU Art Museum building, part of the Visual Arts Complex on the University of Colorado Boulder campus.

About the artists:

Max Bernstein
Max Bernstein's multi-channel, video installations are situated at the crossroads of cinema, theater, and performance. The meandering narratives explore existential ontology, phenomenological inquiry, and semi-autobiographical content. Without the perimeters of a traditional narrative, Bernstein creates a space for the inclusion of the spectator and their presence functions as critical aspect for the resolution of the work.  

Karin Davis
Davis makes abstract sculpture influenced by nature, the process of drawing, and the potential of empty space.  Blending formalism with unconventional materials, emotional content, and humor, she explores the potential of the art object to stimulate the senses and nurture a fuller human experience. 

Tobias Fike 
Tobias Fike looks to human physiology, family relationships and the cosmos for inspiration and material. By focusing on the minutiae of these larger entities, he asks himself and the viewer to rethink what is already known.

Melissa Gordon
Gordon's embroideries are miniature spaces that weave together narrative with ornamentation in thousands of minute stitches.  Through the reinterpretation of the etiological myth of Hagar and Sarah, Gordon's work creates new commentary on the history and language of embroidery as well as redefines the controversial myth that divides Islamic and Judeo-Christian worlds. 

Matthew Harris 
In projects as varied as coating a floor with corn syrup to dragging a friend across the desert, Harris explores not only his physical relationship to the world, but also his mental relationship to it. In hopes of finding expressions that are not taught but discovered through actual experience, Harris relies on his intuition in creating works that playfully question how society values time, intelligence, and beauty. 

Dawn Hollison 
Dawn Hollison uses the moving image for the poetic exploration of narrative structures. Her work draws upon questions about the nature of visual language, while examining themes of allegory, myth, and archetypes.

Matthew Weedman 
Matthew Weedman’s practice consists of an habitual, bordering on compulsive, exquisite corpse of research; digging through antique stores, scouring the internet, questioning family, friends and strangers, searching through personal and public documents, wandering areas of commerce, eavesdropping conversations, cataloging social behaviors, reading historical and theoretical based texts, all while frantically trying to draw lines of connection to fuel the never-ending quest of understanding.  

Casey Whittier 
Hundreds of white daisies cover a glowing sugar coated landscape. A shell of their mortal selves, they serve as reminders of the opposites desires that exist at core of mortal consciousness: the infinite and the ephemeral, the eidetic and the distorted, mortality and preservation. Casey Whittier’s work explores the psychological and physical relationship to notions of landscape, sense of place, beauty, loss and longing.