This year marks the 100-year anniversary of the University of Oregon Department of Art’s MFA degree program, making it the second-oldest Master of Fine Arts program in the country.
To commemorate the milestone, the 2023 MFA Exhibition returns to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the UO campus. The five artists showcased in the exhibition— Lily Wai Brennan, Mary Evans, Anastasiya Gutnik, David Peña and William Zeng — represent a diverse range of media and practices, spanning eco-feminism and social practice, to speculative fiction, fundamental joy and ideas about representation through the materiality of painting. The exhibition is on view through June 20.
“For each of these artists, this exhibition is the culmination of three years of intensive study, including academic research and creative studio output, as well as an immersion in the Department of Art as instructors in undergraduate courses and labs,” said Ron Jude, director of graduate studies art. “It’s a rigorous period even when the world is stable, but it should be noted that this MFA cohort spent their entire first year in pandemic lockdown, attending and teaching their classes remotely, while developing their studio practices with online critiques. Their perseverance and ability to overcome these extraordinary circumstances and produce the fully realized work seen in this exhibition is a remarkable achievement.”
Lily Wai Brennan is a craft-based interdisciplinary artist whose concern lies in the experience of living within ambiguous bodies. Inspired by pop culture, dreams and meditation, Brennan interrogates themes of interrace, queerness and femme. Drawn by personal narrative, her practice acts as an entry point for conversation regarding marginal identity.
Her thesis is titled “How Do the Visible Hide?” and it articulates the complexities of voyeuristic experiences in marginalized folk as she finds herself affected by a recent stalking incident.
Mary Evans is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in experimental video and paper-mache sculpture. Evans has developed a unique visual and conceptual vocabulary that speaks to ideas of consciousness, spiritualism and interdimensional realities. Rituals of symbolic transformation are performed as characters travel into and flirt with the void in the format of pop music videos.
Anastasiya Gutnik (top photo) is an interdisciplinary, Russian-born artist whose work incorporates walking, storytelling and notions around place and transience. Primal materials such as soil, salt, ash, bones and grasses become starting points for her installations for their physical properties, cultural meaning and ecological significance.
The human and nonhuman find connections through their own gestural expressions, gravitational pulls and historic entanglements. She explores the way people’s connection to the natural world and each other is influenced generationally, weaving together installations that consider distant past and the complexities of the contemporary moment and imagines future relational possibilities.
David Peña is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural organizer from the border region between Tijuana and San Diego. He uses the vocabulary of patterns to contemplate personal and public occurrences and as a point of collaboration. He seeks to connect his visual practice with his commitment to people and place, exploring ways to bridge community and understand organizing as an art practice.
Liminality, or transitioning across boundaries, has been a central focus within his practice. He investigates the many ways people enter and pass through in-between spaces and the ways we are confronted with borders, geographical, internal, tangible and abstract.
Will Zeng uses painting, performance and object-making to explore subjectivity through the intersection of Asian American, masculine and queer identities. Zeng engages tensions between subject and object, graceful and pathetic, shame and pleasure, intimacy and distance as means of articulating a lived experience.
His work currently utilizes the rice rocket, a racially derogative term that broadly describe compact Asian import cars modified in bad taste and imports racing culture as a space for exploring the opportunities presented by the failure of the Asian American masculine subject.
—By Debbie Williamson Smith, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
—Top photo, from left: Lily Wai Brennan, Mary Evans, Anastasiya Gutnik, David Peña and William Zeng