For Immediate Release

April 26, 2012

Contacts: Jewell Watson, 301-405-2763 or jwatson4@umd.edu

2012 Masters of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition welcomes six candidates at The Art Gallery

May 10, 2012 – May 25, 2012   

COLLEGE PARK, MD. – University of Maryland’s The Art Gallery proudly presents an exhibition showcasing the work of six Master of Fine Arts candidates from the Department of Art Masters of Fine Arts program. The works exhibited by this year’s 2012 MFA Exhibition candidates Selin Balci, Michael Booker, Felicia Glidden, Pete Karis, Adam Nelson, and Alex Peace represent the culmination of their studies and their artistic development during their time at the University of Maryland. Below are extracts from the artists’ statements, highlighting the philosophies and methodologies involved in creating their work:

Washington D.C. based installation artist, Selin Balci, uses simple living organisms in her artwork. Balci applies an acute scientific laboratory practice to create her art works where she is constantly discovering and combining the scientific material and mediums. Her work is process-based and is focused on interactions and transformations.

Growing up in a family of quilt makers, Michael Booker’s investigation of quilt making has led to the abstracting of its’ ideals to cross the line from craft to fine art. By breaking it down to its' simplest form, fragments of memories, he is able to use the language of quilt making to reflect on issues and experiences that occur within families and communities.

Felicia Glidden dreams in vivid color. Her thesis installation Divination Method fractures light and space on a permeable architectural sculpture. By projecting images through paper and steel inside of a soundscape, this work explores the unseen as clearly visible. She incites metaphor as divination, memory, and the internal landscape. Her research involves journaling dreams, and roaming Europe and the US looking at art and icons of Mary. The sound score evokes the mystery of visitation and pilgrimage through a series of dream narratives.

Pete Karis looks at the process of art making as a type of evolution of thoughts, ideas, techniques and outcomes. While most of his work has been kinetic or machine based, he now uses those machines and ideas to generate new work that is not entirely kinetic. His artwork is influenced by living in areas where industry, wastefulness, and the destruction of architecture impact every aspect of life. While these concerns are a starting point, his work generally incorporates these influences with humor and an air of absurdity intended to act as a counterbalance of the more serious connotations that can be interpreted.

Adam Nelson uses plastic materials, light, and heat, to fabricate installations of erratic energy. As vehicles for the transfer and exchange of matter and energy in the world, tumultuous phenomena occur naturally or through human agency with infinite degrees of scale. Their aftermath brings about a sense of leveling in terms of their physical and cultural impact. By emulating characteristics of instability within the confines of the studio, he is able to exploit the mildness of controlled space with fixed volatility.

Alex Peace is an artist who believes in painting the moment when the historic and the autobiographic collapse within a single frame. He is driven by the creative process as well as his practice of research into the antiquity of objects and the effects of their authenticity.  

The public opening reception for 2012 MFA Thesis Exhibition will be held on Thursday, May 10 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. The exhibition will be open to the public through Friday, May 25, 2012. The Art Gallery will be open to the public on Monday, May 21 during the University of Maryland’s various commencement ceremonies. The Art Gallery is located at 2202 Art-Sociology Building on the University of Maryland College Park campus. Please visit www.artgallery.umd.edu or call 301-405-2763 for more information.

University of Maryland, College Park | The Studio Visit

This past May I had the pleasure of making the trip up to see the studios of six MFA candidates at the University of Maryland, College Park. Accompanied by...

Jonathan Monaghan will be featured in a group exhibition of video art and performance at NY Studio Gallery in the Lower East Side.

Exhibition runs from June 3, 2010 through July 3, 2010

Reception and Performances: June 4, 7-10pm


http://nystudiogallery.com/?method=Exhibit.ExhibitDescription&ExhibitID=348AC21F-19DB-5802-E0F80367962443E5

NY Studio Gallery is located at 154 Stanton St. New York, NY 10002

Thesis Exhibiton for 2010 MFA candidates at University of Maryland. The Exhibition includes: Jack Henry, Joe Hoffman, Tim Horjus, Sarah Laing, and Stewart Watson.

Opening on April 23rd
5pm-7pm
at the University of Maryland Art Gallery.

For immediate release: February 10, 2010

Felicia Glidden has been added to the roster of artists represented by the Marion Royael Gallery in Beacon, New York. Her work can be seen in an exhibition at the gallery through March 10, 2010

What: Sculptor Felicia Glidden at the Marion Royael Gallery
Artist Reception Feb 13. 2010 6-10 pm
Where: 460 Main St., Beacon, N.Y.
When: through March 10, 2010
Contact: Steven Riddle, Barbara Riddle, at (727) 244 5535
info@marionroyaelgallery.com


In Brief: Felicia Glidden, a sculptor from the north woods of Minnesota, brings the forces of nature and the psyche into the gallery in the form of striking cast iron and bronze sculptures that resonate on many levels.


Katherine Sharpe, writing recently in the Field Museum’s Seed magazine on Minneapolis’s very popular art-into-life Art Shanty Project, now in its sixth year, writes about the Ped Pex Power Pod, Felicia Glidden’s brainchild, in which participants generate power for coffeemaking and other uses by pedaling on bike frames. “Glidden, a former engineering student, believes that science and art are united by their physical approach to the world,” notes Sharpe. “She became interested in alternative energy while researching whether she could practice sustainable metal casting. Ped Pex is an installation, but it’s also a real experiment in process.”
Glidden’s approach to art has one window open to science, engineering, and technology—her casting process is innovative and experimental, and she helped build the cupolette Aurora for the North Shore Iron Pours that she helped found.
There is also, however, a window open to mysticism in Glidden’s work. Living for many years on the shore of Lake Superior, she developed a way of seeing spirit in matter that seems to grow out of the soil in that region. She lived her commitment to a community of artists and musicians, gathering them around her for days-long music and dance, and involving them in the iron pours that increasingly became a focus for this wide-ranging artist.
Her current long-running series, Matris Fe, or “Mother Iron,” looks back to ancient northern iron mysticisms—the spirit of iron is depicted as a rough heavy head, exploding into shards of energy. This powerful imagery is created in part by the will of the artist, but it also leaves a window open to the mysterious workings of the molten iron itself: a role is always allotted to chance.
Her show at the Marion Royael Gallery will focus on these essential cast metal works, as well as others in which Glidden’s consciousness of process and spirit of adventure are plain. She is calling the spirit of metal to dwell in these forms, to shape them in ways that speak to us across a vast space of material difference: how does metal become knowable by flesh? How can flesh participate in the nature of metal?

Open Studios

There will be open studios this weekend coinciding with the exhibition opening and print symposium.

Interview with Jonathan Monaghan

Hey all! here is an interview with me done by Philadelphia-based art crtic Robert Fallon:

http://theartblog.org/2009/10/architecture-of-fantasy-an-interview-with-jonathan-monaghan/

Architecture of fantasy — an interview with Jonathan Monaghan
"Jonathan Monaghan’s animated video projection “Into Temptation (French Penguin)” stood out in the recent emerging artist show, Vox V, at Vox Populi. The competition to get into the show, which was juried by Ryan Trecartin and Larry Mangel, was fierce; and the immersive installation, which wonderful, made it hard for one work to speak louder than another. Nonetheless, Monaghan’s silent and eerie piece — a mash-up of a cathedral with a penguin — intrigued me. Reverberant of the age-old struggle between flesh and stone; man and animal; religion and the id, the piece has beauty, weirdness, exquisite craftsmanship and a kind of goth-cinematic style. In our era of vampire-obsession it is channeling ideas about “the other” in a way that doesn’t use vampires! Click for Full Interview...