12 May 2009

'And Things of That Nature' - New Projects from the MIT Visual Arts Program

And Things of That Nature is an exhibition of new projects by masters degree candidates at the MIT Visual Arts Program.

The Visual Arts Program
Under the aegis of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the MIT Visual Arts Program operates as a critical production- and education-based laboratory within the context of an advanced technological community. The graduate program explores the role of art in society and considers artistic practice as knowledge production and offers a Masters of Science in Visual Studies. 617.253.5229 | vap@mit.edu | visualarts.mit.edu

The Mills Gallery
The Boston Center for the Arts Mills Gallery is dedicated to presenting exciting contemporary works by local, regional, national, and international visual artists and curators. During each exhibition, the BCA provides multiple opportunities to engage with the artwork and artists through its Artist Talk series and other related events. The Mills Gallery is the BCA's non-profit gallery. Exhibitions and public programs are free and open to the public. $5 donations are suggested. 617.426.5000 | info@bcaonline.org | www.bcaonline.org

Projects by

Haseeb Waqar Ahmed
Shamshir+Windtunnel=Progress
Using the MIT windtunnel, Ahmed replicates and sustains the moment of midstrike in a Shamshir sword. The installation presented at Mills Gallery documents this attempt to draw a straight line through history. www.haseebahmed.com

Gina Badger
The Little Dig
The first in a series of projects that use the actions of gardening as strategic points of departure to develop a vocabulary of urban intervention. Here, digging is a central metaphor referencing infrastructural development, the history of urban gardening in the US, research, and the fostering of collective political agency through all three. ginabadger.com

Caitlin Berrigan

Berrigan's work investigates ideas of interdependence using materials associated with both nutritional sustenance and fear of contamination. Milk and blood, as well as disembodied casts of her own internal organs, expose the complex possibilities of interrelation between bodies, particularly in an age when organ transplants and other radical forms of exchange are increasingly part of a globalized economy. membrana.us

Jaekyung Jung

Through disarmingly simple strategies like having a collaborator wearing a drum with the message 'Hit Here If You Feel Victimized,' or wandering the streets of Boston wearing a mirror, the videos of Jaekyung Jung explore civic agency in public space. In each project, Jung has orchestrated a situation where viewers are asked to question their assumptions about socially accepted norms. www.jaekyung.info

Jin Jung
a play: Between Me and You
Jung directs situations to give attention to relationships that surround us. She writes and hands out text that can instruct and give background to these situations. At the gallery, viewers will find props she has created that can be performed with their bodies. These performing objects mediate the interaction between us. www.jinjung.com

Matthew Mazzotta

Insertion Module
Designed for a buildings negative spaces, it stands completely camouflaged in the façade until taken out and transformed. This Insertion Module finds its home under a staircase of an industrial building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until it is pulled into the street and transforms into a tea house. Now on display at the Mills gallery. matthewmazzotta.com

Alexander Rosenberg
Rosenberg's work explores identity through longing and failure. In his installation, 'Enoch Robinson's Desert de Retz,' Rosenberg recreates on his own terms the life and work of Enoch Robinson, an eccentric inventor who built a perfectly round house in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1856. alexanderrosenberg.net

Jegan Vincent de Paul
///COUNTER is a hybrid platform combining art, science and economics. With this platform, Vincent de Paul wishes to find creative solutions to problems faced by societies in conflict. More on ///COUNTER at countercorporation.com.

Jess Wheelock

Using video, performance, sculpture, and photography, Jess Wheelock depicts episodes of calamity on a small personal scale: everyday disasters that lie somewhere between banality and significance. The scenes created by Wheelock suggest a struggle against limitation and a desire for wholeness and happiness � all of which are infused with irony and absurdity. www.jesswheelock.com

Thanks

Thanks to José Luis Blondet, Curator, Visual Arts, Boston Center for the Arts. Funded in part by the Council for the Arts at M.I.T.