Project Type: DANM MFA 2019

The 2019 DANM MFA exhibition represents the culmination of two years of intensive study and creative work, encompassing a range of artistic practices and approaches to the use of new media. Selected by the graduating artists themselves, Receivership, the exhibition’s title, alludes jointly to the conditions of production and reception in art, and pointedly calls out the historical moment that has shaped their work and lives here.

Gregory Sullo

Musicians

Sound, traditionally considered a time-based medium in art and music, slows down to stillness in Musicians. Sine waves beat against one another, cresting or falling into nodes and antinodes as sine waves appear, disappear and reappear, demonstrating the physical presence and interaction of sound in space.

Greg Sullo is a sound artist based in Santa Cruz, California. With a long history in music and performance, his work now explores the relationship between sound and space. Creating multi-channel audio installations, he asks listeners to consider their roles in the act of listening.

Website

Zoe Sandoval

{ remnants } of a { ritual }

{ remnants } of a { ritual } is an immersive installation that explores the crossroads of memory, crystallization, love and longing. Seeded with media from the artist’s past, this living archive invites participants to engage with artifacts undergoing cultural and alchemical transformations.

Zoe Sandoval is a Mexican-Venezuelan new media artist who specializes in immersive installations. Their work engages audiences in whimsical spaces that explore the boundaries of the sacred, and the intersections of play, ritual, and culture.

Website

Photo Credit: Allison Garcia
Photo Credit: Allison Garcia
Photo Credit: Allison Garcia
Photo Credit: Allison Garcia
Photo Credit: Allison Garcia
Photo Credit: Allison Garcia
Photo Credit: Allison Garcia
Photo Credit: Allison Garcia

Matthew Mitchell

After W.D. Stewart and Walter Jackson

After W.D. Stewart and Walter Jackson is a piece of music which explores the ideas of these two musicians. It reflects the artist’s effort to deepen his understanding of certain aspects of their work, as seen through the lens of his own musical practice.

Matthew Mitchell is a musician, artist, and musical instrument maker. He spends most of his time thinking about music, and also seeks small ways to resist systems of domination and capital.

Avital Meshi

Classification Cube

In the age of machine learning and virtual reality, the human body becomes an image, one both generated and analyzed by these technologies. Classification Cube invites viewers to step into a real-virtual grid and compare the physical body with the virtual one.

Avital Meshi is a California-based artist, born and raised in Israel. Her practice explores adventures in virtual reality, intertwined with her real-life experiences. She creates interactive installations and participatory performances that blur the boundaries between real and virtual worlds, challenging notions of identity politics and preconceived labels of gender, age, race, and behavioral roles.

Website

Photo Credit: Allison Garcia
Photo Credit: Allison Garcia

Jordan Magnuson

Videogames After Poetry

Videogames After Poetry is a collection of videogame poems. Some were created in direct response to written poetry, while others offer meditations inspired by the artist’s daily life. All seek to reimagine videogames as a medium of poetic expression.

Jordan Magnuson is a game designer and interactive media artist. He explores the most basic elements of interaction and representation to craft meaning and impact in videogames, using games to tackle difficult subjects and complex emotions. https://www.necessarygames.com/

Photo Credit: Allison Garcia

Yanzi Li

Wandering

Wandering is an interactive installation that illuminates physical and emotional entanglement with screen devices and the Internet. It uses motion tracking technology, visual art programming, and display technology to create an immersive experience, highlighting the constant distraction arising from ever-changing online information.

Yanzi Li is a new media artist who maintains a multifaceted art practice at the intersection of art and new technologies. She draws on a wide-ranging knowledge of the contemporary world and her fertile imagination to create interactive installations.

Photo Credit: Allison Garcia
Photo Credit: Allison Garcia

Chelsea Jones

JOYGRIEF

JOYGRIEF is a multi-channel sound installation. It samples an array of multiple interviews conducted by the artist. Through these interviews, common and divergent themes emerge, connecting visitors to the human experience and leaving them to meditate on some of life’s most difficult feelings.

Chelsea Jones is a multimedia artist and musician based out of Fresno and Santa Cruz, California. Chelsea’s digital arts practice focuses on exploiting software and using obsolete technologies to showcase the beauty and fun in imperfection and stochastic outcomes. She also really likes collage and sound. And basset hounds. And her extremely fluffy cat, Jumpo.

Richard Grillotti

Resonant Waves: Immersed in Geometry

Resonant Waves: Immersed in Geometry reveals hidden and overlooked beauty in the familiar. It visualizes the surprising phenomenon of vibrating water, using sound to generate intricate, dancing, visual, geometric patterns, while also exploring the effect of vibration on our physiological and emotional systems.

Richard Grillotti is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist whose work merges art, science and play. A close examination of the natural world inspires his work, which aims to reveal the hidden or overlooked beauty in the seemingly mundane and familiar.

Photo Credit: Allison Garcia
Photo Credit: Allison Garcia
Photo Credit: Allison Garcia

Kathleen Deck

Enviro-Envision

Enviro-Envision is an interactive installation that reflects research about the complex interactions that happen within the Santa Cruz coastal redwood ecosystem. In non- linear narrative form, it reveals the effects and consequences of human-induced climate change on local environments.

Kathleen Deck‘s work offers contemplations on science, art, the environment, and climate change. Through her artistic research practice, she challenges viewers to become actively engaged and educated in environmental issues, with the hope that an informed public can help forge a more sustainable society.

Photo Credit: Allison Garcia

Keegan Farrell

Code-Switching

Code-Switching is a film and game space that explores the dynamics of how racism communicates in a society that clings to thinly-veiled racist values and policies. Using elements of deeply personal experience and historical symbolism, it works to problematize the concept of whiteness itself.

Keegan Farrell is an artist and performer interested in the potentiality of new technologies to either perpetuate or dismantle racial domination and other types of oppression. She’s also interested in future collaborations generate new forms of epistemology, pedagogy, methods in social advocacy, and algorithms informed by black feminism.

Photo Credit: Allison Garcia

Kavi Duvvoori

Titled, “Untitled”

Titled, “Untitled” presents a compendium of language games by the artist, created in conversation with various models of language. It compiles games in an online wiki and presents them individually in a reading room installation, referencing and then implementing various theoretical frameworks. Individual games engage their governing metaphors, or draw attention to what their theories exclude.

Kavi Duvvoori is a digital writer with undergraduate concentrations in mathematics and literary arts. Their research interests include constrained writing, the algorithmic mediation of language, simulation games, literary and linguistic nonsense, and the problem of paraphrase (including the biographical).

Shimul Chowdhury

Stitching Solidarity

Stitching Solidarity creates an enclosed space out of quilts embroidered with images representing the lived experiences of young Muslim people. The cathartic dialogue within their hand-stitched memories reflects conflicting notions of belonging and citizenship that resonate with Muslim communities across the U.S.

Shimul Chowdhury is a multidisciplinary artist whose work engages social practice, highlighting the voices of Muslim and/or South Asian diasporas while subverting traditional textile and fiber craft practices. She’s probably knitting as you read this. Website Link

Photo Credit: Allison Garcia