UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The Penn State School of Visual Arts (SoVA) first-year master of fine arts exhibition "Why Are You Here?" is now on display at the Edwin W. Zoller Gallery through Feb. 6. After one semester of integrating into the program, first-year students exhibit their work, including, photography, painting, sculpture, graphic design, ceramics and video. A public reception with light refreshments will be held at 5 p.m. Monday, Jan. 26, in the gallery.
The exhibition title is a question regularly asked of first-year students as they begin their studies. Formatted as a show name, this question allows first-years to consider this query in an exhibition setting. Additionally, the title asks audiences of their task as critical players in the reciprocal nature of viewing art.
The exhibiting artists are Emily Burns (graphic design), Jeremy Dennis (photography), Henley Kim (new media), Nikki Lau (ceramics), Sidney Mullis (sculpture) and Kree Wiede (painting and drawing).
Burns, via book design and photography, discusses the boundaries of gender performance and the bandwidth within which we may operate safely and without scrutiny. With photography and sculpture, Dennis shares what it means to be Native American through indigenous storytelling to reassert its relevance for the present.
With her interactive video and game, Kim offers the opportunity for viewers to accept, in a more positive manner, their traumatic histories and psychological pains that may have been previously denied and disavowed. In a large-scale ceramic installation, Lau provides a narrative that examines the disorientation of transnational Asian American identity.
Mullis, in her video projections, presents mating rituals of imagined animals to understand the cultural constructions that have manifested for individuals to demonstrate their “fitness” to potential mates. With paintings of socially neglected areas, Wiede explores the materiality of paint within the paradigm of the landscape tradition.