Cornell MFA Show

This week DAC welcomes the Cornell University MFA show "Meditations in an Emergency," curated by Christopher Lew.

April 28–May 7, 2011

Reception: April 30, 6pm to 9

For emerging artists today, the environment in which they create is one marked by distraction and preoccupation. Meditations in an Emergency—whose title is borrowed from Frank O'Hara's 1954 poem—suggests how to make work in a time of disruption. The studio, whether it be in a physical room or lodged in the mind and imagination, is a space to pause and think, a generative space that does not run counter to the world at large, but is positioned at a certain distance and remove from it. It provides a way for an artist to create in a time of crisis, moving beyond gut reaction to a headspace that is more contemplative and insightful.

Meditations in an Emergency brings together eleven candidates of Cornell University's MFA program who all reveal individual notions of what art can be through varied approaches. Some artists give primacy to the materials employed while others are led by research-based methods, and still others play off the tension between subjectivity and authorship, content and form, or the power of the image and its ability and inability to convey meaning. The exhibition aims to make tangible what O'Hara describes as "the ecstasy of bursting forth"—a sense of birth and renewal as these artists contribute to dialogues about art and its making that extend beyond their immediate communities, into a larger conversation that is potentially and inherently international in reach and multigenerational in scope.

Featured artists: Robert Andrade, Piotr Chizinski, Amie Cunat, Gabrielle Jesiolowski, Gabriela Jimenez, Daren Kendall, Baseera Khan, Ruth Oppenheim, Benjamin Rubloff, Farideh Sakhaeifar, Bernie Yenelouis