Irvine Contemporary is pleased to announce Introductions5, our fifth curated “MFA annual” that brings a selection of new artists from leading art college programs to Washington, D.C. To select this year's invited artists, the work of over 200 recent graduates from leading MFA programs across the US was reviewed. Finalists were selected through thesis exhibition visits, artist studio visits, and open submissions.
Invited artists for Introductions5
Jonathan Dankenbring
MFA, Indiana University
Sculpture and Installation
Jonathan Dankenbring creates sculptures and installations that examine the cultural information in common objects and surfaces, isolating them and re-fabricating them in unexpected and often contradictory materials, allowing suppressed meanings to become visible in our new awareness of the objects.
John Hill, Jr.
MFA, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Drawing
John Hill makes drawings that exploit the tensions between instinctive desires, fantasies and the cultural agreements made to keep them "safe." His densely detailed drawings evolve intuitively, becoming a record of his performance with pen and ink in a struggle with reckless abandon and control.
Christopher LaVoie
MFA, Maryland Institute College of Art
Sculpture
Christopher LaVoie de-familarizes everyday objects by remaking them with new materials, and questions the materials used in traditional sculpture: a suspended "cross" can be a milestone or a headstone, but formed of concrete, and the familiar brass knuckles shape he creates from cast eggshells. In LaVoie's works, the stability of objects and materials are disrupted and re-created.
Paris Mavroidis
MFA, Pratt Institute
Digital Media & Film
Paris Mavroidis presents a complex digital 3-D animation film, "Divers," which tracks the movement of a group of divers from mile-high diving boards. The divers perform sky-diving formations and Busby Berkeley-like aerial choreography and finally plunge into an ocean, where we glimpse multiple spiral diving board towers ascending back into the sky. A striking narrative from concept to execution.
Matt Sartain
MFA, Academy of Art University, San Francisco
Photography
Matt Sartain composes highly-detailed panorama photographs that present strange but accessible narratives, fantasies, and allegories involving a central figure in a deep-focus landscape. Each image is full of visual surprises and presents a convincing fictional world where nostalgia, the hyper-real, and the surreal converge.
Wayne Toepp
MFA, Maryland Institute College of Art
Painting
Wayne Toepp works with images taken from surveillance cameras, which he transforms into paintings on a larger scale. He transfers the familiar details of surveillance TV monitors--shadows, contrast, graininess--into haunting paintings of the "found imagery" of a panoptic world: the viewer of a painting is now in the position of a CCTV viewer but distanced from the original scene.
Yi-Hsin Tzeng
MFA, Savannah College of Art and Design
Painting and Mixed Media
Yi-Hsin Tzeng reconceives painting and drawing on three-dimensional surfaces on a series of panels that extend like cubes or longer 3-D shapes that allow her to present multiple surfaces simultaneously. Her main theme is the ongoing attempt to give color and shape to human desire and loss, having and not-having, and allowing viewers to experience this essential human condition on multiple planes.
Stacey Lee Webber
MFA, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sculpture
Stacey Lee Webber creates sculptures from the materials of common labor and construction, capturing the social symbolism of objects used in manual labor but re-purposing them as found objects for the creation of sculptures by the artist's own hand. Her works startle us into an awareness of the design of tools of construction work, often hidden from sight, like drywall screws embedded in a finished building that become a material archive of the human labor expended in its production.
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