Sharpening a Screw resists easy resolutions. The works on view signal the value of iteration, returning to a thought, a question, or a method to look for the unexpected. Each of the nine MFA students from the Lamar Dodd School of Art use materials as fasteners, presenting a constellation of themes from which to step back and look anew.

Taken together, the artists offer both a gentle sincerity and tongue-in-cheek bite. Where Lindsey Kennedy drills into the pictorial doom of climate dread, Martin Chamberlain and Alejandro Ramirez pull back with a wry grin, presenting witty objects that are convincing yet playful. Kit Rutter illustrates a story of perseverance and care that breaks through paper pulp thickets, while Dylan Lewis crafts a narrative in which sewing and alchemy meet. Yoon Hwang’s drawn and pinched marks imbue clay with all the history that hands collect, as Katie Ford and Ashley Wingo’s sculptural assemblages magnetize traces of memory and identity into form. Lastly, Meredith Emery plays with text in her fantastic and extended examination of the American burying beetle.

The exhibition nods towards the compulsion that often drives these creative processes. The artists are as much compelled by the cultural relevance of their subject matter as they are by the desire to scratch an insatiable itch—to wade through the fog of making until meaning emerges. Viewers are invited to consider the works in the exhibition as meditations in which the artists refine the poetry of their materials, in which the screw is sharpened time and again to see what holds.

re:(de)construction is an exhibition, a circular and continuous call and response, presenting the work of eleven MFA students who studied at the Lamar Dodd School of Art for the past three years. Starting their program during the height of the pandemic, these artists have witnessed and participated in a deep re-examination of the structures that govern society. Through their various material experiments in video, painting, print, photography, metals, clay, and sound they share a commitment to reconfiguring and reinventing new ways of being in the world. 

Many of the works on display take literally the idea of construction, as several of the artists mine materials in their investigation of the built environment. Others display a commitment to the play involved in taking things apart and putting them back together, just absurdly enough to call it art. While still other artists critique constructed expectations surrounding identity, history, and memory both personal and political.

Tearing down and building back up, tearing down and building back up again, once more. Processes that began in individual studios and through collaborative projects, now operate not only within the broader, shared context of the MFA exhibition, but also upon the societal structures these artists reimagine.

Artists in the exhibition include: AJ Aremu, Mickey Boyd, Zahria Cook, J Diamond, Shaunia Grant, Chad Hayward, Huey Lee, Jason Rafferty, Rachel Seburn, Ethan Snow, and Lee Villalobos. 

A hand, like a sheet of paper, suggests a verso and a recto, a past and a future closely connected in their reference to one another. This exhibition presents works on paper by the American artist Kara Walker that deal directly in the contradictions of misremembered histories, most pointedly in her career-long representation of the horrors beneath the antebellum South’s genteel facades. In the drawings presented in the gallery, Walker mingles washes of watercolor, gouache, ink and graphite to create a series that calls forth the past at once mythological and real, ancient and contemporary. 

Walker’s influences are varied and vast, from the political sketches of Goya, to the caricatures of Daumier, to the medieval Book of Hours. The title of the exhibition suggests a rebuff, a slap in the face but also a familiarity, knowing something like the back of your hand. This paradox may relate to Walker’s own relationship to the South, having grown up outside of Atlanta in the shadow of Stone Mountain, a monument to the confederacy. A landscape can hold both a personal knowledge and a deeper wound infected with a collective history of violence. Here, Walker presents a more ambivalent reading: That which hurts you is often the very instrument you know most intimately.

This exhibition is generously supported by a gift from the Lupin Foundation.

Brooklyn-based learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, explores the poetics and politics of machine learning. Having grown up in East Palo Alto, CA, a region that later came to be known as “Silicon Valley”, Rasheed had early access to emerging technologies including adolescent experience with computer coding. This, alongside her syncretic upbringing, a Muslim with formerly Protestant parents who sent her to a Catholic high school, Rasheed was exposed to parallel worlds of religion and computation, both modes of sense-making that relied on prophecy, formula, and close reading. 

Some twenty years later, Rasheed has slowly returned to questions of computation, the role of the reader, and ritual in Smooooooooooooooth Operator which considers the menace of smoothness. We know what a smooth thing is; we’ve run our hand over a surface without noticeable projections or interruptions. Smoothing as a practice shows up in music via quantization and again in image processing via filters. Both are procedures of standardization and forced patterning by disregarding dirty data (or noise) in the service of fulfilling the audience’s expectations. Smooth viewing is easy viewing because the brain doesn’t have to second guess what it is looking at–it’s easily assimilable. Smooth images, smooth text make smooth, speed readers.

Smooooooooooooooth Operator examines how image-based GANs and autoregressive language models like GPT invite us (by the risk of doing otherwise), to develop new modes of reading that are attuned against the smooth and new ways of making that introduce noise, fringe, and as Prem Krishnamurthy writes, “bumpiness.” In P!DF, V.6.0.0 (2020), Krishnamurthy offers:

"A little bumpiness—the productive friction that slows things down and forces a moment of reflection— [...] Within a world increasingly oriented towards smoothed out experiences, [bumpiness] argues for the political necessity of things that produce friction: objects and ideas that are created with care, yet remain uncertain."

Rasheed’s installation includes a series of diagrammatic and typographic paintings on various substrates as well as directly on the wall in addition to a video work. Collectively, these works explore what Krishnamurthy calls “a pleasure within the irregular, in what’s not already expected and familiar” and what Rasheed considers “an ecstatic encounter with the unexpected.” This project continues Rasheed’s practice of building accretive fields of annotation, indices, and footnotes through the architecture itself. Smooooooooooooooth Operator thus is an architecturally-scaled reader; a network of references pointing back to one another and elsewhere in this pursuit to map Rasheed’s inquiries. Within the exhibition, visitors can use their whole body as a reading vessel as they move through the space: body as computer mouse, body as planchette. 

This exhibition is made possible from a generous grant from the 2021 Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grant Program.

Downstream opens with a fountain. Created by Luka Carter and placed at the entrance to the courtyard of the Athenaeum, the fountain announces our annual MFA exhibition, featuring nine students connected by their studies at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. The fountain, punctuated by a goofy guppy and a friendly alligator made from clay, gushes forth not with water, but instead Gatorade, a urine colored energy drink favored by athletes. It is a similar product featured in Mike Judge’s 2006 dystopian cult classic, Idiocracy. In that film, the energy drink is marketed as a healthy alternative for plants which inevitably leads to a world-wide food shortage. Not unlike Judge’s spoof on the end-of-the-world, the artists in this exhibition grapple with our contemporary condition. At times the work can appear playful, brightly colored, maybe even light. But look closer and each artist, in their own way, examines the fragile vicissitudes of living in America today. Themes that appear throughout the show include our current climate crisis, past trauma, stereotypes related to race, and late-stage capitalism. 

The title suggests that these artists are moving with the flow or being carried with the current, towards the mouth of the river, where one might be diverted toward a new direction. Just as they have worked alongside one another for three tumultuous years, they will graduate and move on, continuing their practice while inventing entirely new landscapes. Artists in the exhibition include: Rosie Brock, Luka Carter, Casey Connelly, Victoria Dugger, Isys Hennigar, Matthew Hoban, Craig Howarth, Forrest Lawson, and Annie Simpson.

“But one can insist, as many have, that only the changing is really enduring and all else is whistling in the dark.” 
–Allan Kaprow, “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,” 1958

The Lamar Dodd School of Art is pleased to announce the opening of the annual MFA Thesis Exhibition, displaying works by students graduating with their Master of Fine Arts Degree. The exhibition entitled Whistling in the Dark will run from April 12th through May 15th. 

Whistling in the Dark features the work of seven MFA students working in a variety of media from video to installation, painting, photography, and sculpture. The exhibition takes its name from the artist Allan Kaprow’s seminal 1958 essay “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art.” Kaprow suggests that the only way to thrive is to change. Throughout the three years of their studies, these students have continually reinvented and re-examined their practice. Changing and then changing again, never more so than in this past year marked by a global pandemic and uprisings due to racial injustice. Responding to and growing from these struggles, the artists' works explore themes related to memory, the banality of everyday life, visual representation, questions of power and who wields it, and legacies of the American South. Above all, the exhibition is a testament to the growth of these students as they refuse a fixed position, choosing to endure. 

Artists in the exhibition include: Mac Balentine, Matthew J. Brown, Caitlin Adair Daglis, Alex McClay, Katharine Miele, Ciel Rodriguez, and Kelsey Wishik.