Opening Reception: Post-haste: 2019 Stanford MFA Thesis Exhibition
The Department of Art and Art History presents Post-haste, on view May 14 through June 16 at the Stanford Art Gallery. Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, May 16, 5–7 pm.
In Post-haste, Stanford’s four graduating art practice MFA students–Neil Griess, Sally Scopa, Stephanie Sherriff, and Livien Yin–each deliver their culminating work in our program. For two years they have traveled, learning with exquisite detail the weight and texture of what they carry, transforming both themselves and their abilities as couriers of urgent messages. In a world vanishing ever more into the digital and the disembodied, these eloquent young artists invite a delicate balance. They ask us to engage in the rigorous labor of noticing our histories, our positions and our residues in the world, as closely and in as much detail as possible, while still moving with the speed required by our urgent times. —Camille Utterback, faculty curator
Neil Griess is an artist working in painting, drawing, and mixed media works. He is interested in how histories and modes of viewing shape landscapes, particularly of the Great Plains and the American West. His works often incorporate layered imagery, exploring how place is rendered as a function of time, personal experience, and social context. Neil is from Omaha, Nebraska, and received his BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with an emphasis in painting in 2011.
Sally Scopa is a visual artist exploring the relationship between painting and sculpture. She approaches painting as a system of rules that were made to be broken, often departing from traditional expectations about the medium by incorporating sculptural elements and processes. Sally graduated from Harvard University in 2013 with a degree in visual and environmental studies. She is from San Francisco, California, and has exhibited her work in Boston and the Bay Area.
Stephanie Sherriff is a first-generation college student from South Carolina. In her practice, she works with light, video, sound, and plants to create abstract, ephemeral forms that prod at the edges of mediated realities. Her artwork is experiential and consists of sculptural, time-based systems and performances that are often living, changing, and sometimes dying. She received her BA in studio art from San Francisco State University in 2014 and has been actively performing and exhibiting work in the Bay Area since 2008.
Livien Yin examines interdependence between humans and non-humans. Inspired by artifacts that unsettle the distribution of power among living things, she researches the intimacies of colonial botany, Chinese immigration, and the stories of laborers who are tasked with controlling natural resources. Her assemblages respond to the continued influence of these multispecies histories. Livien received her BA in studio art from Reed College in 2012.
Image: Airship over Ekeberg, 1926. National Library of Norway.
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