April 12–April 26, 2008
Opening: April 11, 7-9 p.m.               

MFA graduates:

Elia Arce 
Chuy Benitez
Jeanne Cassanova
David Damico
Jane Eifler
Woody Golden  
Sarah Hannah
Luisa Hernández
Iskra Ivanova
Ann Marie Nafziger
Kadriye Ozpolat
Kelli Vance

In both poetic and straightforward ways, this year’s graduates from the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Houston engage deeply with the issues that concern them—self-definition, social justice and responsibility, and an ambivalence toward the commercialism that surrounds us. A defining moment of their time here at the university happened during their first semester when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. The artwork of these twelve graduates offers us their reflections on watershed moments such as Katrina and other significant experiences of the world around them, from the humble to the extraordinary.

In her performances, Elia Arce releases what is inside of her with intense abandon. Born in Costa Rica, the artist moved at the age of 22 to the United States, where she was forced to redefine herself in an unfamiliar culture and a completely foreign language. Her experience with misunderstandings, alienation, and prejudice have informed her work ever since. In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Arce was involved with the performing arts scene in Los Angeles. There, she developed collaborative improvisations and actions with the homeless, prostitutes, and immigrants at a time when the culture wars were marginalizing many performance artists. Later, Arce cultivated spiritual themes in her work and found that she could express these concepts with her body. With a keen intuition, she continues to plumb internal mysteries of love, fear, sexuality, and violence, and in so doing, manifests a ritual transformation of herself and her audience.

Raised on Mexican and Mexican American artistic traditions in El Paso, Texas, Chuy Benitez takes photographs from a Chicano point of view. His panoramic mise-en-scènes and fish-eye 360-degree portraits of what the artist as dubbed “Leaders of Houston Cultura” tell multilayered stories about his community and the powerful personalities that inhabit it. The incredible detail of Benitez’s images has a subtle political significance. By showing as much factual evidence as possible, he hopes to combat any assumptions about the people he portrays and fully convey the varied contexts in which Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Chicanos are living today. The photographer also uses digital technology to knit multiple exposures into one picture that, although requiring hours of labor on the computer, nonetheless captures its subject’s spontaneous actions. By creating technologically advanced photographs of rarely depicted individuals, gatherings, and rituals, Benitez is fulfilling an important role for his community—he is a record-keeper, storyteller, and revolutionary.

Jeanne Cassanova paints intricate worlds that are at once fantastical and uncannily familiar. Growing up in New Orleans around Mardi Gras, Catholicism, and hurricanes made her aware of the fragile relationship between the alluring and the repulsive. The painter seeks to harness this power to draw people in and fascinate them with the unpleasant. The outlined figures that Cassanova layers with colorful bursts of resin, glitter, beads, and flamboyant decorative patterns are taken from photos she had collected of dollar-store shoppers, game-show contestants, and other exemplary citizens of our saturated world. These people mirror our experience of shopping, watching television, and hungering for the abject beauty and manufactured desires to be attained therein. Influenced by both Pop art and Surrealism, her bewitching, hypercaffeinated dreamscapes entice us like a shiny shelf of trinkets laid out in a display case and invite us to invent stories about what is taking place there.

David Damico is a designer whose work goes beyond two-dimensional layouts to encompass animation, a psychological/typographic card game, and even sculpture. An avid reader who is deeply engaged in the history and forms of typography and its affect on meaning, he has been able to translate his theoretical studies into concrete creations, including typeface design and flash cards referencing the development of typography. About a year ago, he started printing texts on three-dimensional objects, creating a series of “collection boxes” and a sculptural installation based on Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. These works offered a tactile experience of words and space that mutually reflected one another, and Damico soon realized he could use this powerful technique to comment on politically charged themes, as he did in a series on Hurricane Katrina with jazz quotes printed on discarded materials. Most recently, he has been engaged in post-structuralist theory and ways that typography serves a semiotic function.

Jane Eifler’s oils carefully balance color, form, and texture in lush layers of abstractions. But as Pablo Picasso once said, “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.” Eifler follows Picasso’s methodology of reality-once-removed and looks to magazines, fabrics, billboards, and advertisements as sources for her shapes and colors. In particular, she is interested in the visual stimulation one encounters while walking down the streets of a city such as Houston, where she has spent most of her life. Through transfer and translation, the painter’s inspirations are morphed and reborn. Each form is given a life and personality of its own that caresses, covers, reveals, and dances with its fellow characters on the canvas. Thus, the objects in Eifler’s paintings become communities unto themselves with their own alliances and tensions.

The large tower on the first floor of Blaffer Gallery was designed and built by Woody Golden, an artist who focuses on human connections to the earth and cosmos. It is a prototype for a stone or metal structure that will stand outdoors as a “terra-antenna,” gently funneling cosmic radiation into the ground. Scholars such as Phillip S. Callahan believe that round towers in Ireland were built for this purpose by Celtic people, who channeled radiation into the ground to increase rainfall, foment vegetation, and lengthen the lifespan of nearby plants and animals. Golden has studied these ancient structures in depth and intends to build his own version on his land in New Mexico. Like the Irish structures, the one in the gallery has a doorway raised above ground level. The interior is designed to promote meditation on the interconnectedness of the universe from subatomic particles to cosmic dust.

Sarah Hannah’s interior design is elegant and metaphorically rich. Hard geometries of squares and rectangles form the armature of her Blaffer Gallery installation. Two-by-fours are joined together in five-by-five-foot modules that are held to the wall with metal bracing and threaded rods. A white, scrimlike fabric hangs from a rod in front of the wood and on it is projected a black-and-white image of the pattern made by the two-by-fours. Time and movement are important components of the installation as the viewers who walk through the room cause the fabric to wave as their shadow passes in front of it. The wood pieces are also stamped “prime stud” by the manufacturer, a mark that is left visible to indicate the process the wood has gone through to get here. All in all, the wall construction implies a certain breathing, interior/exterior life and growth that mirror the human condition.

Luisa F. Hernández is a graphic communication major who is interested in ways that technology affects social and personal identity. As virtual reality becomes increasingly sophisticated, growing numbers of people are being drawn to programs in which they are asked to create an avatar, a digital representation of themselves. Since we have limited control over our appearance in real life, the avatar seemingly offers users the freedom to look however and be whomever they choose. But because software platforms offer a limited number of options, avatars are unavoidably homogenous, and their forms are created by companies whose primary concern is profit. So instead of being dictated by genetics and socioeconomic class, our virtual appearance is determined by technological capabilities and the market. Hernández’s work therefore seeks to combat the temptation to identify with avatars by fracturing the virtual figure from the personality it supposedly signifies.

Informed by the folk traditions of her native Bulgaria, Iskra Ivanova sculpts organic, life-size clay forms covered in layers of white, red, and black earth using the sgraffito technique. Her forms embody a duality of masculine and feminine elements. The masculine sculptures stand erect to express endurance and are covered with nonrepresentational marks reminiscent of the scars of suffering. The feminine works have onionlike shapes that are reminiscent of Byzantine domes and suggest a womb or breast with a central opening that alludes to birth. The merging of male and female elements is significant for the artist because of her self-identification with the mythological character Ulysses. Just as the hero traveled the ocean for many years, so has Ivanova left her home to see the world.

Ann Marie Nafziger’s paintings, prints, and wall drawings are inspired by those unexpected, fleeting moments when you see something amazing out of the corner of your eye or take notice of something in plain sight that you’ve never paid attention to before. Her hazy paintings layer semitransparent plantlike silhouettes with more abstract streaks and washes to create rich textures that reward prolonged looking with rich unpredictable experiences. The precise subject matter of Nafziger’s images cannot always be ascertained, but the viewer feels as if they are seeing through a dimly-lit mirror or sorting through a blurry memory in search of clarity. The painter has lived in Portland, Oregon, and Marfa and Houston, Texas over the past ten years; each location has affected the quality of light and the natural forms in her work, and the overgrowth of Houston’s natural and man-made landscape is no exception.

Kadriye Ozpolat’s interior design stresses the handmade and utilizes the dichotomy of craft and the factory-made for dramatic effect. Her work begins with the experience of using her hands to fabricate wall hangings, doorway decorations, and other interior accents. This process creates a physical bond between the maker and the object. Ozpolat has said, “This open dialogue enables the designer to learn as much about the material as herself.” Weaving, knitting, and crocheting are fundamental to her vocabulary and were learned from her mother in her native Turkey. However, she puts these techniques to work on metal, wood, and other unexpected media, thus causing the traditional and modern to become one. Through correct choice of material, careful lighting, and sensitivity to space, she creates domestic areas in which the viewer is surrounded by tactile experiences that resist rationality and insist on more intuitive sensitivities.

A unique hybridization of oil painting, photography, and performance, Kelli Vance’s artistic process begins when she stages an action, usually in a dramatic natural setting. She adopts a character for each that often relates to the pantheon of leading ladies—from damsels in distress to vixens—and performs their movements and emotions. A camera with a timer or a collaborator then photographs her performances, and these pictures end up as the source for the artist’s large canvases. The group of canvases thus becomes an almost cinematic experience in which Vance has controlled every detail in anticipation of the audience. By disconnecting the performance from herself and the viewer from the performance, she is simultaneously exposed physically and artistically yet concealed behind layers of interpretation and representation. In the process, we are made hyperaware of our own voyeurism as onlookers.

The 2008 School of Art Masters Thesis Exhibition is made possible through the generosity of the UH Student Fees Advisory Committee.