Wednesday, March 24, 2010

My Thesis Exhibition: Invented Heirlooms Part 1

My MFA Thesis Exhibition was March 8th-19th. I began installing the show on Friday the 5th at about 5pm. I have amazing friends that came out to help me with the install and thanks to them, the show was completely hung by about 11pm. Then I had the rest of the weekend to prepare (okay, freak out) about my oral defense on Monday morning. The oral defense was Monday morning at 9am. At the defense was my thesis committee, Becky McDonah, Tedd McDonah, and Nancy Serwint (filling in for Clare Verstegen who is on sabbatical). My out of area committee member was Sam Chung. In addition to the committee there were about ten graduate students in the audience. The defense lasted about an hour, after which the committee sent me out to deliberate. They talked amongst themselves for about 20 minutes before calling me back in to let me know that I had passed, and to discuss more about the work and exhibition with me. We talked for about another half an hour and then it was all over.
Basically what we talked about was the general theme of the work, how the different pieces worked together as a group, and what I planned on doing next. We talked about display, materials, and my motivation behind the work. There were no questions that were unexpected or that threw me off guard, which made me very happy. In the next post or so I will include a more lengthy description of the ideas behind the work in my show.
Below are some images of the installation (taken by photographer Josh White). In this post are just images of the wall pieces, and the spoon collection. I will be posting the rest of the show tomorrow. View all the photos here.









Thanks for looking and stay tuned for more tomorrow!

2 comments:

Valerie A. Heck Esmont said...

Thanks for sharing all the pictures, I'm glad your oral defense went well. When I had mine it turned out to be a realy quick thing. : )

Nicole said...

everything looks so beautiful! Wish I could see it in person!