Master of Fine Arts Candidates Exhibition I

University Gallery will host two exhibitions showcasing the work of University of Florida School of Art and Art History’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree candidates. The first will run from March 19 to April 2, 2021. The second will be open from April 9 to April 23, 2021. Concurrent with these exhibitions at University Gallery, further graduate student work will be shown in Libby Gallery. The exhibitions are free and open to the public.

The exhibition will be guest-curated by Gean Moreno, curator and director of the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Moreno says that he hoped to “involve the Art and Art History Department’s graduating students in a process very similar to the one that they will be involved in as they begin to interact with institutional curators as their professional careers unfold.” The exhibitions will feature work in a diverse array of media, including graphic design, ceramics, installation, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and video.

Master of Fine Arts Candidates Exhibition I

Parisa Nabiyouni
Parisi Nabiyouni’s video installation seeks to explore how consumerist logic, as it becomes ever more woven into our society turns the consumer into particular kinds of subjects, imbuing us with artificial desires and drives.

Andrew Norris
With his large-scale oil paintings, Andrew Norris explores how the often-disparaged forms of Americana and heartland kitsch can be recharged as instruments through which to generate and explore queer identities.

Emmanuel Opoku
Emmanuel Opoku recodes geometries and semantic systems usually associated to particular geopolitical contexts through an unexpected entangling of consumer objects with some of the “substrate” materials—roofing materials, plumbing, bathroom fixtures—that give shape to American suburbs and cities.

Chad Serhal
Dredging notions mid-American sensibility and landscapes, Chad Serhal turns his raw materials into unexpected and uncanny media artifacts by cutting up films, sound tracking animations through feedback looping, and arraying collages to function almost like animation storyboards.

Foad SM (Seyed Mohammadi)
Foad recalibrated his use and understanding of documentary photography to explore the often-alienating condition of having to engage an unfamiliar landscape, thinking of landscape not only as a physical territory, but of also as a matrix of cultural habits and expectations.

Vahid Valikhani
Through a series of photographs taken from suburban areas in the United States, Vahid forms an overview of landscape construction, altered natural landscapes, and everyday scenes. Through this overview he attempts to represent landscape as a notion driven by structures of power and ideology and calls for a greater awareness of human impact on the environment.

Address

400 SW 13th Street
Fine Arts Building B (FAB)
Gainesville
FL 32611

Phone

(352) 273-3000

Website

Gary R. Libby University Gallery Website