Curatorial Statement

Dwelling is a multivalent word. It can describe a place. It can describe an action. That place can be a physical structure or a mental construct. That action can be oriented from different perspectives. You can dwell in a place, time, or construct, experiencing it from the center as it envelops you. You can dwell on a place, time, or construct, observing as it develops adjacent to you. We dwell in our homes in the present. We dwell on the past and on the future. Furthermore, while we all might hope to dwell in a happy and contented place in time, oftentimes we are forced to dwell in conditions beyond our choosing, forced to grapple with circumstance to secure a safe dwelling for ourselves and for those who come after us.   

Sense of Dwelling: Master of Fine Arts Candidates Exhibition I presents mixed media works featuring painting, sculpture, photography, video, and sound that each explore in their own way the importance, power, and possibility to be found in an exploration of dwelling as place, action, and experience. Dustin Adams’ rules based photographic process culminates in risograph printed books, which document natural site and multiple levels of human trace on pages that never fully dry and smudge slightly under the viewers’ touch. With her mixed media sculpture of found objects and quilted representations of plant life, Courtney Boyd’s work emphasizes notions of displacement, history, craft, and landscape as they stem from her Appalachian roots. With their installation, Brendhan Garland reframes and reconstitutes a moment of trans-becoming through the recreation of a living room viewing of Cinderella in her childhood home. Finally, Noah Kellough constructs a bedroom within the gallery space that encourages the viewer to step inside the artist’s mind and become more comfortable than is usually allowed within an art exhibition. 

Sense of Dwelling: Master of Fine Arts Candidates Exhibition II also presents mixed media works featuring painting, sculpture, photography, video, and sound that each explore in their own way the importance, power, and possibility

to be found in an exploration of dwelling as place, action, and experience. Chandler Damrill’s archeologically inflected installation constitutes an “archive of the future.” Presenting the remains of the life and work of a mysterious inventor extracted from an apocalyptic future, Chandler’s work chronicles the persistence of hope in an inexorably doomed world. Lexus Giles’ installation, shaped by PVC and ceramics made from Mississippi clay, places a spotlight on the ongoing water crisis faced by residents of Jackson, Mississippi. Lexus asks the gallery visitor to engage with the perspectives of a community that continues to be disrupted by the negligence of government institutions and a failure of public infrastructure. Through the conceptual framework of Abolitionist University Studies, Otari Oliva Buadze makes visible the burdens faced by graduate students under the university system in the state of Florida. In a bold combination of text and design, their prints emphasize the limiting effect of institutional demands on a student’s capacity for social engagement. In her multi-channel video piece, Jeongmin Park investigates the difficulties to be found in navigating the boundaries of cultural perception and reception as a foreigner in the United States. Jeongmin’s video projections focus specifically on the nature of language as barrier and boundary between different cultures. Finally, Kenny Wilson’s large paintings that drape from the wall into the gallery space, make available for greater scrutiny the seemingly familiar. Drawing on memory and lived experience, Kenny’s pieces make the wonderous nature of seemingly mundane space shaped by everyday objects harder to look past.

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The works of each of these artists present the visitor with unique constructed environments that invite a dwelling on notions of lived experience, permanence, desire, nostalgia, and possibility.