Andrew Pisacane
Gaia grew up in New York City and is currently a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. His studio work and gallery projects have been exhibited in Brooklyn, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. His street work has been documented and featured in several recent books on urban art, including, most recently, Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art, (Berlin, 2010). Gaia lives and works in Baltimore, MD, and Brooklyn, NY.
Statement
Drawing on his new and evolving body of imagery depicting human and animal figures, Gaia’s work reflects on the ancient themes of animal and human sympathies, but now in the context of the city and the human built environment. Working with myth and symbolic animal figures, Gaia’s street murals are like the works of an urban shaman drawing on a positive force from animal protectors.
Gaia employs recognizable animal figures to remind us of lost human connections to nature and the environment. He constructs an image of a reversal of the “natural order” where animals intervene as protectors and avatars for a new awareness of the human condition in the natural world. He is known world-wide for street murals placed in areas to elicit surprise and reflection by passers-by who encounter the symbolism and fragile narratives of his work. – Martin Irvine
Proposal
The Legacy Project is a basic attempt to reinscribe the architectural figures that have shaped our urban landscape back onto the surface of their legacy. The infrastructure and policies that we have inherited and must navigate are publicly reexamined in this body of work. The imposing portraits of these prodigious identities are given context in the space of their own design by accompanying quotes explaining the reasoning behind the plan. Robert Moses, the preeminent power broker of New York and propagator of modernist design is superimposed back onto Route 40, Baltimore’s beloved James Rouse, the innovator of American downtown reinvigoration, is installed onto the Waverly Development, one of the first Urban Renewal sites in America. Such street pieces are intended to reanimate the past in an effort to reveal the invisible mechanisms of urban planning and to locate a responsibility.
2011 Graduate Fellowship Award Winner
Taryn McMohan
Born and raised in New Jersey, Taryn McMahon is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa, where she a recipient of the Leola Bergmann Graduate Fellowship and a Graduate Teaching Assistantship. Following her undergraduate studies at the Pennsylvania State University, she was the printmaking artist-in-residence at the Lawrence Arts Center in Lawrence, KS where she managed all aspects of the John Talleur Print Studio. In 2008, she was granted the Geraldine R. Dodge award for a residency at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. Her work engages the dialogue between contemporary print media and historical objects to illuminate and challenge deeply held beliefs in constructing an idea of the natural. Using the visual language of historical print works, the artwork combines interdisciplinary media including printmaking, video, and installation, and has been shown nationally and internationally including Chicago, IL, Washington DC, Grand Rapids, MI, St. Louis, MO, and Croatia.
Proposal
The impetus for my artwork is to engage the dialogue between contemporary print media and historical objects that illuminates and challenges our deeply held beliefs in constructing an idea of the natural. In my practice and research as an artist, I use the visual language of historical print works to explore personal narratives that focus attention upon notions of nature, life cycles, and interconnectedness through the use of interdisciplinary media including printmaking, video, and installation. Currently in a research and development stage, my MFA thesis project will culminate into an interdisciplinary body of work that engages in the larger discourse of my field to be exhibited in Iowa City, IA, in March 2011.
Drawing directly upon the imagery of 17th and 18th century engravings, my artworks are recombinant forms of biological systems, micro and macro viewpoints, found objects, and pure invention. Questioning the ability of humans to objectively study and represent the natural world, the resultant prints and drawings imply evolving relationships between each other, their environment, and the viewer. As discomforting hybrids, they defy categorization as animal, vegetable, landscape, inside or outside. Blurring the line between reality and fantasy, the figures are at once specific and familiar, yet strangely indeterminate. As a result of being directly connected to their surface of wall or floor, the prints, video, and sculpture become installation, and implicate the entire architecture of the room in sustaining the artwork. It becomes a question of boundaries – between one artwork and another, between the artworks and the surrounding space, and as the broader metaphor between an organism, its peers, and its environment.
My MFA thesis exhibition is scheduled for March 4-11 2011 in Iowa City, IA, and is tentatively titled Their Wondrous Transformation and Peculiar Nourishment. In January, I will begin producing the majority of the elements, including large-scale silkscreens on Japanese style paper and mylar. The resulting installation will involve print media, sculpture, and video and will be installed in the gallery just prior to the exhibition’s opening during March 4-6. Between late March and early May, I will be researching and finishing the written portion of the thesis.
Funds garnered through the Southern Graphics Council International Student Fellowship will be used for the supplies necessary for my MFA exhibition, especially video and printed works.
