LIFESPAN: 2023 MFA EXHIBITION

LIFESPAN: an exhibition of visual arts MFA students

December 6, 2023—January 26, 2024
Fenwick Gallery @ Fenwick Library

Lifespan is an exhibition of recent work from MFA candidates in Mason’s School of Art. Rather than an endpoint, this exhibition is a moment in the ongoing process of artistic and scholarly investigation: some of the artworks featured here were created during the past semester, some earlier in the year, and some are new iterations of revised ideas. Featuring a diverse range of practices and media including drawing, sculpture, papermaking, graphic design, and experimental video, Lifespan bring these works out of the studios and classroom, seeing how they resonate in a new space. Memories are untethered and rebound, bodies are undone and reconstructed, and stories are unmade and retold. 

Lifespan will be on view in Fenwick Gallery from Wednesday, December 6—Friday, January 26, 2024. 

Traci Reynold’s The Body Must Bear No Trace uses mixed media to delve into the visceral and often-unsettling liminal spaces of identity.

Mackenzie Hoffman’s I AM USER is a reflective piece inspired by the literary transformation of James Gatz into the enigmatic ‘great’ Gatsby, confronting the impossibility of escape within our surveillance-driven society, probing the tension between identity and anonymity.

Chen Bi’s A Chinese Childhood Home is a nostalgic ode to the ephemeral nature of memories, captured within the walls of a traditional Chinese household.

Steven Luu’s The Book of Record Keepers gives physical form to the human desire to shape history and knowledge through papermaking and book.

Angela Terry’s Print is Precious: A Design Manifesto is a confession of love for print design. The book is a “brand guide” that states and demonstrates her style. It reflects upon her different life influences and how it manifests in her work.

Liz Louise’s New York, Winter, and Holga discovers the beauty of decaying leaves, symbolizing the ephemeral memories we try to seize but ultimately fail to hold onto.