Documentary Art at Home & Away
A new collection documenting our coronavirus spring by the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts community.
Introducing a Visual Collection from Early Spring
When we invited artists affiliated with the MFA EDA and the Center for Documentary Studies to contribute to “Home and Away,” part of the Arts and Artists are Essential series, it was early May—the height of the quarantine and sequester period of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We asked that folks submit work by May 22, reflecting on the experience of “both the knowns and unknowns, the mundane and the sublime” in our stay-at-home isolation. Since that time—marked most significantly by the brutal killing of George Floyd on May 25—our days and concerns have shifted mightily. The simplicity of staying home, and away, is supplanted with individual and collective desires to express outrage and demand change.
These pieces pre-date that shift, and provide a reflection on a particular moment. The work presented here reveals the universal truths of what it means to be still, isolated, and observe closely, to use the documentary arts in a pure, intuitive, and personal way. Talena Sanders MFA EDA ’13, reflecting on the desire to use the isolation to make “so much new work” while also being virtually present in the lives of others, in the larger world, may say it best: “Every day is an ongoing process of striking some balance between these tensions—being gentle and human, engaging with the shape of life in the pandemic, and also being an active, ambitious artist.”
Thomas Rankin
Director, MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts
Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary, Art, Art History, and Visual Studies
Aaron Canipe: "I'm Right Where I Want to Be"
"My fulcrum is the constants when everything seems to be spiraling — love, beauty, light, seasonal changes, a good cup of a coffee, a home-cooked meal, and of course art."
Caitlin Margaret Kelly: "Learning to Communicate with Absence"
"I had the idea recently to see if the absence I am learning to communicate with is the same as the one she is experiencing, or if it is just too particular to our ages as to offer common ground."
Jade Xiong: "Masks Are All I Can See"
"Masks are all I see. Masks are all I cannot see."
Kristin Bedford: Cruise Night
"Over the last five years I have collected archival photos, ranging from the 1940s to 1980s, of Mexican American lowriders in Los Angeles. I decided to explore these images and begin an Instagram project where I post a couple photographs each day. Memories are powerful especially when we are limited in what we can currently do."
libi rose striegl: "Magic Glowing Rectangles"
"With every other aspect of life being forced into magic glowing rectangles, and with my own need to spend hours a day staring at my screen as I finished and prepared to defend my dissertation, the need to make things in more tangible modes became acute."
Lisa McCarty: "New Visual Metaphors"
"Collage has become a vital form of making for me right now. Fragmentation, superimposition, and montage are the languages I have chosen to explore in order to conceive new visual metaphors that address our post-pandemic reality."
Minh-Hoang Nguyen: "Impossibility of Intimacy"
"The impossibility of intimacy in this time made me once again use myself as my subject, this time with more heightened urgency. The sense of longing and vulnerability in my photographs became even more profoundly felt."
MJ Sharp: "Portals Between Realities"
"Close looking at these tiny three-inch-deep portals between realities has taken on a new poignancy in this time of our constantly assessing the safety of our own personal boundaries and the substituting of rectangular 'pictures' of reality for actual people and places."
Summer Dunsmore: "An Emblem of our Shared Future"
"My MFA thesis research as well as my current visual art work seek to examine ways of being embodied in an inextricable relationship with technology and the environment. Our collective health is a reflection of the earth around us. Face masks and face shields represent ways of moving through physically-manipulated spaces."
Talena Sanders: "Every Day is an Ongoing Process"
"I went into shelter in place mode with some optimism about how much work I could get done. My ideas of what resilience looks like have shifted in the past ten weeks. I live alone in rural northern California and spend a lot of time in contented solitude. I figured isolation would feel familiar to me. But this extensive, total isolation, this lack of structure, this yawning future with no set end date - this is not my everyday isolation."
Laurids Andersen Sonne: “Notes to Myself and Others”
We live in unprecedented times (or so we think), where new fragmented and fluctuating political, social, economic, biological, and ecological trajectories constantly challenge what it means to be human (globally, regionally, locally) now, and into the future.
Annabel Manning: "Epicenter of the Epicenter"
"The need to keep active with my communities during this Coronavirus period of social isolation has led me to develop virtual, immersive, artistic experiences that allow us to reflect jointly on the challenges we face."