Cornell MFA Exhibtion

Erika Germain, Giselle Hobbs, Shelby Johnson, Annamariah Knox, Tina Lam, Christine McDonald, Erin Miller, David Nasca, Bec Sommer, Emily Loamy Tatro, Layla Zubi A Long Toast showcases a range of projects that reflect the current research and concerns of 11 artists who span a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, textiles, print, audio, and video. The title refers to the desire for a sense of community during a time laden with uncertainty, while celebrating the ability to gather in person after being confined to virtual spaces for so long. Erika Germain (’22) works across painting, printmaking, sculpture and ceramics, and social practice, exploring themes of poetics, language, religion, and community. Giselle Hobbs (’23) creates large-scale illusionistic paintings that probe the relationship between humans and the natural environment while taking into consideration a range of cosmologies from various time periods and geographical locations; her work also includes photography, bio-art, and sculptural installation. Shelby Johnson’s (‘23) work is based in therapeutic reimaginings of reality. This piece addresses traumatic memory and how physical manifestations can rewrite the past. Annamariah Knox’s (’23) piece is an embodiment device, designed to give body to the space between people. Tina Lam's (’22) land-art interventions, sculptures and mixed-media installations explore processes of physical and metaphorical transformation, hybridity, and exchange through the melding of industrial materials with natural forms, scientific notions with personal cosmologies, and somatic experiences with philosophical musings. Christine McDonald (’22) is a multi-disciplinary and concert artist based in Brooklyn working with both complex and rudimentary systems of infrastructure; boneyards and their unique methodologies for archiving civilian and war machines with proprietary spraylat is her recent material-concert project. While using print as a starting point, Erin Miller (’22) often traverses between disciplines—printmaking, painting, drawing, textile-work, and sculptural installation—to investigate themes of perception and the theatrics of making. David Nasca (‘22) makes sculptures mining the animal kingdom for queer metaphors. Bec Sommer (’23) creates transformative works that take emotions, figures, and settings from other media and collages them for a shifting variety of emotional and political motives. Emily Loamy Tatro (’23) is a painter and sculptor interested in the life-forces of earth, fragmentation and recombination, and the sentience of matter. Layla Zubi's (’22) recent work features painting, sculpture, and screen print fused together to imagine the movement of historically known Ottoman-era Anatolian rugs departing from depicted Biblical scenes of Renaissance paintings and transforming as its own individual being. Funding for this exhibition is provided in part by the Cornell Council for the Arts and AAP Alumni Affairs and Development.