UMCP MFA: May 2009

Midpoint, exhibition at the Stamp Gallery showcasing works from second year MFA candidates from the department of Art at the University of Maryland. Exhibition from May 11 – June 10, 2009. Opening Reception May 14th from 5:00-7:00PM

College Park, MD— The Stamp Gallery presents Midpoint, an exhibition of work by five artists in their second year of MFA candidacy at the University of Maryland. Featuring artists Jack Henry, Joseph Hoffman, Timothy Horjus, Sarah Laing and Stewart Watson, Midpoint offers a look at the diverse works being produced by these candidates.

About the Artists:
Flint, Michigan, where Jack Henry is from, is an automotive town, where abandoned factories and houses fill the suburban landscape. The buildings reveal a rich visual history in their decrepit state, far more interesting than if they had been covered with a fresh coat of paint. Henry’s work is an attempt to capture the essence of that imperfect beauty.

Joseph Hoffman’s most recent works pair the subtle qualities of sound along side its more brazen traits. He explores how sound shapes our interactions with the world around us. As Anne Fernald tells us, “Sound is touch at a distance.” Hoffman is interested in exploring the qualities of sound and its affect on our psyche.

Timothy Horjus’s work evokes a contemporary reality by utilizing the language of modernism to discuss our reliance on digitally produced and transmitted information. The titles of his work are inspired by the anonymous subject lines of spam emails. Horjus assigns as titles to his works the spam subject lines allowing the paintings to function conceptually.

Sarah Laing’s work centers on her interests in the universality of our biological make-up and landscape; combined with the collective sense of the sublime. The imagery in her work is derived from landscape photographs which have been removed from their original context, rotated, and multiplied. They then evolve to take on ambiguous abstract forms that can be seen in a micro/macro context: animal or landscape, recognizable yet alien.

There is a common conceptual thread in Stewart Watson’s work – a fascination with the point at which two things meet. While that point of contact continues to speak of weakness and controlled failure, this new body of work is drawn from her interest in her genealogical history as developed through natural genetic patterning and created codes and languages.

The Stamp Gallery is located on the first floor of the Stamp Student Union on the campus of the University of Maryland, College Park. The gallery is free and open to the public Mondays-Thursdays 10:00am – 8:00pm; Fridays 10:00am – 6:00am, and Saturdays
11:00am – 5:00pm. For more information please visit the gallery’s website http://thestamp.umd.edu/gallery/ or call (301) 314-8493.