UMaine Intermedia Student Selected for National MFA Biennial Exhibition
Contact: Gabriella D’Italia, 234-2542
ORONO–Gabriella D’Italia, a student in UMaine’s Intermedia master of fine arts program, was selected for a national biennial exhibition of MFA students. Imaging Desire: Aegis First Biennial Graduate Student Exhibition will be held at the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville, Ky. The exhibit will run from February 12 to March 21 at the university’s Gallery X.
The exhibit is held in conjunction with the school’s symposium on visual culture, scheduled for Feb. 14. According to Aegis, the Hite Art Institute’s graduate student organization, the theme for this year’s symposium is inspired by a collection of essays by contemporary artist Mary Kelly, also titled Imaging Desire. Her writings discuss how desire has influenced the art and art history of the last four decades.
D’Italia is a fiber artist from Newburgh. Her piece Gold Quilts was selected by a panel of jurors.
Of the piece, D’Italia writes:
“I want to explore the simultaneously created and creative aspects of the objects of home. I want to blur the boundaries between objects and magnify their mutability, their fragile definition. I want to make things so elaborately specific they become only precariously classifiable. I want to suggest this elaborate, created, precarious nature for the objects with which we are intimate. In this diptych, I used highly pieced and visibly discernable construction methods. I used a restricted color palette. I created objects, which from a distance look the same, but on closer inspection reveal vast material discrepancies. The materials and techniques suggest mutability and change. The objects reveal their constructed natures. Their definition is blurred by close relationships in construction and color. Creating two objects creates a language and dialogue, a system composed of commonality and, simultaneously, dissonance. This specific language created by the proximity of two parts enables them to become one piece held together by the tension of communication.”
For more information about the exhibition, visit http://louisville.edu/a-s/finearts/cressman_center.html
About the Intermedia MFA program at UMaine
The University of Maine is home to the region’s only master of fine arts degree program in Intermedia. The student-driven program blends arts courses with research in areas including but not limited to environmental studies, engineering, business, social sciences and new media. MFA director Owen Smith explains that this interdisciplinary approach encourages innovation and creative problem-solving in a way that is applicable to any industry or creative application.