SFAI’s 2019 MFA Exhibition opens this Friday at SFAI—Fort Mason Campus. Fifty emerging artists will open their studios and transform the campus into a large-scale gallery, theater and performance space full of multi-media installations, sculptures, contemporary art films, paintings, prints, photography, performances, and more.

To give you a sense of what’s in store for visitors, let us introduce you to ten SFAI MFA students who will be exhibiting work May 17–27!

Check out the first preview of student work, and don’t forget to join us to celebrate the opening of the exhibition on May 17th during the public opening, or May 16th at Vernissage for an exclusive VIP Preview!

Ben Barbour

“These pieces are inspired by a seemingly insignificant wooden cog formerly used for the production of steel machinery components utilized in the extraction of china clay. In casting the object using the very material the cog was designed to process (porcelain), and by combining contemporary technologies such as 3D digital printing with traditional slip-casting techniques, a feedback loop is created between product and tool, and between contemporary and historic industrial processes and materials.”

Arthur E. Gies

“My work explores representational figure painting as an act of deliberate seeing and observation, as well as politics in an era of constant photographic bombardment—of concentration and analysis, understanding and acknowledgment. The individuals I paint determine how they present themselves, initiating a collaborative process predicated on humanity and consent based on their conceptions of identity and body. This subverts the traditional artist/subject dichotomy.”

Kate Laster

“My work is about the people we carry with us. There is a cumulative intensity to my work as I explore tenderness and the space between people—the wordless distance and closeness defining relationships. The process of carving reveals the figure, keeping that specific intensity alive. Working either intimately or monumentally, I make work connected to the weight of the past, human migration, and the effervescent exhaustion of romantic love.”

Eliza Phelan-Harder

“I am interested in the intersection of environments. My work looks at the interaction of city, nature, and humans with the utilization of organic life, photography, and sound. As an artist, I feel the responsibility to address subject matter our society tends to neglect, including adverse environmental impacts. Creating an immersive environment, I try to provide a starting point for the viewer to begin contemplating their own landscape and what role they play within it.”

Kathryn Gardner Porter

“My work exists in the spaces between intuition and intellect, childhood hope and adult reality, the archival past and the ephemeral present. I am interested in exploiting and reclaiming historically recognizable and genericized symbols to explore emotions in a higher resolution. Through the investigation of these symbolic borders, boundaries, and metaphors, I hope to provoke internal reflection and intellectual curiosity, not didactic polarization.”

Gautama Ramesh

“I observe societal, cultural, and ecological violence deep within and far outside of commonly acknowledged spheres of consequence. By hybridizing misanthropic fiction, amoral nonlinear narratives, documentary works, and abstract handmade film, I disrupt and disfigure violence as seen within cinema. Set within fractured infrastructures of nonurban spaces, constructed with tools restricted by the socioeconomic status, time, and geography of those portrayed, these films are nonconformist artifacts, created with hardcore punk rebellion and Woody Guthrie anger.”

Sherwin Rio

“Perpetually foreign, fitting neither here nor there—I am hanging on a clothesline between two countries. Working at the intersection of cultural identities, I investigate the ways in which belonging becomes blurred. Domestic objects, items of clothing, and house-construction materials function as sculpture to reference the home space that became my Philippines in America. Using pieces of personal history as departure points, I ask: Can I ever come to know what’s foreign to me?”

Suzanne Russell

“By using clay to make objects that have no practical function and refuse conventional values of skill and beauty, my goal is to make work that negotiates the uncomfortable space of the abject body and gives ceramics a non-craft identity. I am interested in the ways in which clay can elicit and hold the emotional states and marks of the maker and how this energy can inform the meaning of the work.”

Amina Shah

“Translational Mediations. In my art practice, I situate the work within historical contexts—culling from personal history, then from wider social, political, and cultural contexts. Utilizing the history of subjects and mediums with which I work, appropriating images from mass media and from systems of knowledge production, I am questioning both what is included and excluded, what is archived and what remains ephemeral. Translation becomes a tool to dissect divisive rhetoric and a site for discursive intervention.”

Yiling Zeng

“Born and raised in the East, I’ve had a hard time fitting into a distinct culture since I moved to an unfamiliar city in the West. With film and video, I have found a way to inject my nostalgia, insecurity, perplexity, and anxiety into the characters. They act as eyes and feelers for me to investigate both acceptance and rejection between different cultures.”