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Beyond the Realm of Fantasy at the MSU Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid January 20, 2024 – July 21, 2024 Curator Link to website featuring: Lorelei D’Andriole, Thomas Berding, Rebekah Blesing, Adam Brown, Rebecca Casement, Candice Chovanec, Ryan Claytor, Laura Cloud, Ben Duke, Teresa Dunn, Xia Gao, Lauren Gerig, Paul Glendinning, Rebecca Gonzalez Cifaldi, Paul Kotula, Robert McCann, Nathan Prebonick, Kelly Salchow, Ann de Simone, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Blake Williams What does it mean to engage imagination beyond the realm of fantasy? The 2024 DAAHD Faculty Triennial features over twenty dynamic, exemplary artists that each stand out and leave audiences wanting to see and know more. This nationally and internationally prominent faculty body boldly contemplates and tackles new challenges across mediums and methods. Welcome to their show.
Lorelei D’Andriole works conceptually to evoke trans femme life and her specific experiential memory, arranging ballet flats and boots, saddle shoes, and heels into a sound sculpture on the wall. Xia Gao builds a structure with rope and thermochromic paint, artistically underscoring climate change’s bleak future through an installation form. Paul Kotula shapes meaning from disregarded materiality and signs of injury to natural spaces and the earth. Through self-portraiture and portraiture, Ben Duke reimagines stories of life—exploring the histories and habits of characters across time and throughout the world. Comics artist Ryan Claytor combines nonfiction narrative and illustration storytelling together with a comics poem co-created by his late grandfather. d'Ann de Simone says, “I create my work through a feminist perspective: deconstructing and recontextualizing materials associated with women and adornment.” Rebecca Tegtmeyer employs sewing and fabric as a graphic design practice to challenge patriarchal systems and illustrate gender bias.
Teresa Dunn vividly portrays narratives of so many beautiful Brown and Black heritages and femme bodies, bringing together their poetic realities, monumental pasts, and powerful futures. Lauren Gerig offers a lush, saturated landscape evoking the memory of a shoreside evening that feels like a gorgeous dream. Nathan Prebonick, a painter and printmaker, elevates the ante for mixed media composition and confident precision. Through large installations of abstract worlds—created from a plethora of small-scale works--Candice Chovanec and Thomas Berding each make powerful assertions of spiritual space. Chovanec began her series through a self-exercise of asking and answering prompts as Zen Buddhist Koans. Berding’s collection aims to portray “the world that exists somewhere between a salvage operation and an escapist’s flight of fancy.” “I think of painting as fundamentally fictional and physical,” declares Robert McCann. “The construction of the image is activated by that winding together of hand and mind.” Rebecca Casement patiently handcrafts clay, steel, and resin to portray human emotional experience and change in the form of creature-shapes, while Rebekah Blesing presents an icy clear resin print of a single dragonfly as a coded allusion to personal memory and Celtic mythology. Adam Brown has ideated a compelling and distinctly colored collaboration between art history and historic preservation, technology, and science. Continuing her research into mental states post-trauma, Rebecca Gonzalez Cifaldi contributes works that combine a nineteenth-century photographic printing process with the artmaking technique of color pencil resist. Laura Cloud applies contemporary photography as a tool to provide new viewpoints and fragments of dense architectures from ancient history. Blake Williams presents domestic familiarity and interwoven secrets. Artist and athlete Kelly Salchow describes her practice and experience: “Thousands of miles rowed on bodies of water around the world have instilled in me a deep connection with the natural environment...my creative research aspires to catalyze empathy and positive action towards ecological issues.” Photographer Paul Glendinning, a master of light and shadow, does not need the sun. |