Codex: 2020 Intermedia and Digital Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition Notes
Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the programming involved will be moved online. The exhibition has been postponed to 2021. Read each artist statement below, and view images and links of the individual thesis works.
UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) and the Department of Visual Arts present Codex, the 2020 Intermedia and Digital Arts (IMDA) Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition, featuring work by Brandon Ables, Jason Charney, Mandy Morrison, and Adan Rodriguez.
In One Man Trance, Brandon Ables recreates his studio apartment, demonstrating how he programs his subconscious by scoring everyday gestures with audio and visual accompaniment. Different areas of the installation can be activated when viewers chew food, use mouthwash, practice an instrument, exercise, and lie in bed watching TV.
Mandy Morrison‘s multi-channel video installation Spirits of Promise and Loss employs photographic images of the Old Town Mall in Baltimore as backdrop for ghost-like characters wandering the former landscape of utopian possibility. Now mostly shuttered, the redevelopment of Old Town mall was one of numerous experiments across the U.S. aiming to lure suburban shoppers back downtown.
Adan Rodriguez‘sA Necessary Haunting blurs the line between reality and fiction, highlighting film’s effect on community tourism and the perpetuation of legend. Presented through a narrative short film, documentary, and accompanying physical media, the artist encourages travel to locations where alleged supernatural events took place.
This link has the entire project in a digital format:
https://loketontourism.wixsite.com/home/
Jason Charney‘s installation, reciprocation, reimagines loudspeakers – transforming them from “invisible” aural channels into sculptural objects to interrogate interpersonal relationships, (mis)communications, and the kinetic phenomenon of sound. While recorded audio is used to drive the loudspeakers and implicate the viewer-listener’s body, the heard sound is an artifact of the materials activated by the speakers’ movement. Jason Charney will lead the RTKL Lecture and MFA Award 2020 Announcement with Juror George Ciscle.
The video link below is a virtual tour of the exhibition, reciprocation. It outlines the pieces with studio snapshots/phone videos and digital renderings, showing the works as they would have appeared in the gallery if not for the global COVID-19 pandemic.
https://vimeo.com/405317676
Admission is free.
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