Making Matters: Without Borders 2012
For contemporary artists, the question of the nature of experience, often grounded in concerns with moral, ethical, social, aesthetic, or economic issues, drives their engagement in a wide variety of media and topics. The Intermedia MFA candidates presented in the 2012 Without Borders IX Exhibition, Making Matters, are presenting work that engages with food, economics, gender, technology, housing, philosophy, spirituality, identity, memory, and health. The choice of materials used by these artists and performers of intermedial works suggest, and even call for, a direct participation, seeking to engage the public in new ways to transform perceptions, physically, mentally, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. The exhibition opens on Friday, August 10, at the Lord Hall Gallery on the University of Maine campus and will celebrate this diversity with a public reception on Friday, September 7, 2012, 5:30 to 7:00 p.m.
As long as there is instability in human living, so goes our questioning, our innovation, and our search for balance. It is within the seeming “stupid questions,” the play, the networks of friendships and the rebuilding that Intermedia artists find new ground on which to move into action. Actions and materials can be as simple as pushing pins, but most important are the rule-sets that create the experiences for which larger implications might be examined. Process based actions and reflective collaborations are always in flux. One need not be ‘specially’ cultivated in order to engage in intermedial works!
The 2012 Without Borders IX Festival offers the public an opportunity to be challenged and transformed by new ideas, shifts in paradigms, and rubs against the status-quo. This graduating class of Intermedia MFA students comes from a variety of backgrounds: community building, painting, fabric design, performance, culinary arts, graphic design, computer technology, acting, book-making, and farming. Within the three years shared together as graduate students, it is within the questioning and reckoning, doing and not doing, the unclear, indefinite, and the imprecise that we have found stimulation and inspiration for crucial works presented in this festival setting.
Lord Hall Gallery
University of Maine at Orono
Gallery Hours: M-F 9:00 to 4:00pm