2023 MFA thesis exhibition
March 25–April 16, 2023
The Miller Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present thump, whoosh, rumble, the 2023 Carnegie Mellon University School of Art MFA thesis exhibition. The exhibition spans three floors and presents all new work in wide-ranging media.
Sarah Bowling’s work delves into the emotional and physical boundaries that define us, questioning the thresholds of a body and the weight of desire. In her presentation, a large painting, blushing like a cheek, radiates hot pink from the corner of the gallery while a self-contained fountain system echoes the rhythms of the human body.
Jessica Fuquay turns the first floor of the Miller ICA into an “ambient room,” an environment for listening to the sounds of social spaces where she has found kinship and creative refuge during her time living and studying in Pittsburgh. Her work, Love in the ambient room, uses tools of improvisation and chance to transform her collected materials, applying stretching, looping, delay, and many other time-bending strategies.
Laura Hudspith’s installation, The infinitesimal stirs me as the cosmological, brings macro- and micro- time/scales into relation with one another. Her work, influenced by her experience of living with chronic illness, incorporates salts and glass as dynamic materials to help reorient our thinking on bodies and illness and allow us to embrace our own changefulness and becoming.
Inspired by her research of the George A. Romero archives, Rebecca Shapass’ film no more room in hell explores the zombie as a posthuman species. In the work, which traces Pittsburgh’s shifting industry sectors, Shapass presents the zombie as an embodiment of apocalyptic futurity, representing the ways in which the ghosts of the past often shape our fears of the future.
Rosabel Rosalind’s work Aqua Drama imagines her family synchronized swimming together, through her eyes as a young child with a cross eye disorder. Coining the term “fam-fiction,” the work creates a sentimental fantasy in which her family coexists peacefully through an alternate story of romance, forgiveness, and redemption.
Caroline Yoo’s film lost | born in translation weaves together forgotten Korean mythologies and her own familial memories that were hidden as a result of immigration. Searching for the remaining fragments from the stories of female figures, her film focuses on remembering and forgetting as acts of survival, erasure, and reclamation.
thump, whoosh, rumble is on view at the Miller ICA through April 16.
