Tufts MFA Thesis Exhibition Opens December 2

MFA Thesis Exhibition: December 2 – December 19, 2010

Public Opening Reception: Thursday, December 2, 5:30-8:00pm

Gallery Talk with the Artists: Thursday, December 2, 5:00-6:00pm

An MFA Thesis Exhibition of five artists in the joint graduate degree program of Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston opens December 2nd at the Tufts University Art Gallery. This is the first of three MFA Thesis Exhibitions for the 2010-2011 school year.

Sofia Botero

Sofia Botero’s project is a multi-channel sound installation in which people tell stories about being a child in the midst of the war in Colombia during the 1980s. One recording leads to another, and each story combines to create a single narrative that fills the space. However, if you listen carefully and walk around, you discover further stories.

Robert Gross-Kennedy

Meditation Above the Abyss is a mixed media installation piece designed to create a space upon which the viewer is invited to meditate upon the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The installation creates a darkened space within which sits a shallow pool of inky black fluid that viewers congregate around. The fluid itself moves and flows against gravity and logic as if it itself were alive. The space is filled with the sounds of underwater creatures and events, while strangely serene video clips of the wellhead itself spewing oil out into the environment are projected onto the center of the pool of oil.

John Guy Petruzzi

John Guy Petruzzi presents IN VIVO, a series of mural-scale watercolors that re-envision the bleeding edges of contemporary nature into provocative open narratives of environmental transformation. Rich menageries of life-sized animals are veraciously rendered on polypropylene, a plastic polymer ubiquitous in global technology, raising questions of life, loss, change, and intervention.

Emily Somma

Somewhere Between examines Love Canal, a contemporary ruin, located near Niagara Falls, New York. Once a vibrant neighborhood, it has been vacated due to the toxic wastes that were dumped and buried under the land. Over the course of a year, I have visited the site, documented the remnants and witnessed the ongoing dumping cycle that ensues. A series of photographs and aquatints explore the loss and abandonment felt upon each visit.

Angela Lauren Speece

Angela Lauren Speece is motivated by a quest to recover innate pictorial forms of childhood that are buried beneath the adult complexities of life. Her whimsical portraits originated in children’s drawings but were rendered by the artist’s (re) interpretive hand. Through a blind-collaborative process, Speece develops compositions that provoke contemplation and debate about authorship — was
it created by a child or an adult? Unification of the disparate stages of artistic expression forms a mobius of continuous exchange, visualized interchangeably, with no precise frontier that separates the extremes.

The Tufts University Art Gallery is fully accessible and admission is free. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 11:00 to 5:00 p.m., and Thursdays until 8 p.m. Free visitor parking is available in the Jackson parking lot off Lower Campus Road. For more information visit http://artgallery.tufts.edu.

– Information from the Tufts University Art Gallery