“In looking at this book that I’m almost finished writing, I see here a mosaic pattern (Aztec-like) emerging, a weaving pattern, thin here, thick there. I see a preoccupation with the deep structure, the scaffolding. If I can get the bone structure right, then putting flesh on it proceeds without too many hitches. The problem is the bones do not often exist prior to the flesh, but are shaped after a vague and broad shadow of its form is discerned or uncovered during beginning, middle and final stages of the writing. Numerous overlays of paint, rough surfaces, smooth surfaces make me realize I am preoccupied with texture as well. Too, I see the barely contaminated color threatening to spill over the boundaries of the object it represents and into other “objects” and over the borders of the frame. I see a hybridization of metaphor, different species of ideas popping up here, popping up there, full of variations and seeming contradictions, though I believe in an ordered, structured universe where all phenomena are interrelated and imbued with spirit.
“I will shift from the language of epistemology to ontology, from a focus on an elusive recalcitrance hovering between immanence and transcendence (the absolute) to an active, earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness (vibrant matter).
The twenty-one artists in these two exhibitions are weavers. They are bricoleurs, they are collectors and storytellers, they are our new generation of historians, and they are painters of the impossible-to-describe thing that is the human psyche.
My co-teacher, Rachelle Dang, began our year together by asking the artists—the Yale School of Art 2022 second-year Painting/Printmaking MFA students—to reflect on shared resonances seen in one another’s work. Together, we named embodied knowledge, interdependence, mending and healing, nonlinear time, layered and unreliable histories, tangled ecologies, and, above all, the reverberating power of the material world. Many artists in these exhibitions accumulate, layer, and dissect our material surroundings to reveal truths about human behaviors and our place in an ecosystem much larger than ourselves. Others trace single objects across space and time as a way to read and write anew personal and collective histories. All share overlapping commitments to many ambitious goals possible in painting and printmaking. They—
—trust the embodied reality of painting as sculpture, from pulverized healing crystals to woven food wrappers; from family photographs to second-hand clothing; from the brain’s pinpointed color receptors to the microscopic topography of a paint chip;
—focus new frames on the past and present, through the lenses of architecture, archives, machines, and the mechanisms of the eye itself;
—follow the historical construction of painting’s constituent parts, both substrate and pigment, including the muslin, calico, and poplin donated to a precocious college by Elihu Yale, then President of the British East India Company in Madras, India;
—pinpoint and destabilize symbols ranging from ancient Andean figuration to the colors red, white, and blue;
—express a collective, contingent, and tender self, searching for the body on the edges of perception;
—feel the haunting awe of the soil, the earth, and water, of being with animals, plants, and other creatures;
—embody our many inadequate histories in order to tell us new truths.
Alongside all of this, these artists also create with joy—a true love of painting and printmaking, of research, and of storytelling. They delight in collected materials, recorded sounds, in a new image found. In sharing poems, music, and mending between friends. In writing shared stories and finding escapes from the confines of an exhibition setting.
This exhibition is a glimpse, a snapshot in time. It is an opportunity for each of us to see the expansive goals and brilliance of twenty-one artists at one moment in time and space. This is a thesis exhibition, a culmination of almost two years of work and profound personal and artistic challenges. It is also a nascent moment in the careers of artists I look forward to watching guide us into the coming decades of matter, meaning, and vibrancy.
—Melanie Kress
Thank you to my co-teacher Rachelle Dang, the second year MFA Painting/Printmaking students, and our collaborators across the department who have brought this exhibition to life: Meleko Mokgosi, Anoka Faruqee, Oscar Cornejo, Sophy Naess, Kris Mandelbaum, Sarah Stevens-Morling, A.L. Steiner, Alex Adams, Julian Bittiner, Pamela Lee, Nick Pfaff, and Matt Shropshire. Many thanks to Alvin Ashiatey and Mengjie Liu for their thoughtful design of the exhibition identity and website.