The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Thesis Exhibition is the culminating event of the Master of Fine Arts degree in Art. This year, the School of Art, Art History & Design has three groups of students
presenting a thesis exhibition. Within each group is three distinct exhibitions. The second group includes Wansoo Kim: In Between; Emily Wiethorn: A Certain Kind of Woman; Rosana Ybarra: Chimera.

This second group of MFA thesis exhibitions runs April 9-13 in Eisentrager•Howard Gallery. The artists will give a talk at 3:30 p.m. on April 13th in Richards Hall 15, followed by a closing reception from 5:00-7:00 p.m. in Eisentrager•Howard Gallery.

Wansoo Kim : In Between
I purposely intervene in the viewers’ generalized conceptions by creating an unrealistic scene or object. My works are an assemblage of recognizable and unidentifiable elements, intended to evoke the environment where realism and surrealism coexist. Through my work, I seek to realize what we see and what we do not see, questioning the way we believe, the way we perceive and the notion of awareness and ignorance by presenting dichotomous ideas.

When I transform my ideas into physical objects, I pay attention to the phenomenon that all objects are three dimensional, having physical dichotomous qualities; a closed form, such as a jar, creates two spaces - interior and exterior, and an open form, such as a table, introduces the notion of above and below, horizontally and verticality. This allows me to connect my conceptual interest to tangible objects, naturally narrating the notion of both physical and conceptual dichotomies.

Emily Wiethorn: A Certain Kind of Woman
There is immense pressure on women to “perform” for the public. I learned how to perform my feminine identity, and now I’m learning how to disassemble it, take it apart and see the bones underneath. I’ve learned how powerful my feminine identity is in its imperfectness, but also how incredibly fragile it is as well.
As a young girl, I was given many instructions on how a woman should act and spent my life in the well-intentioned disguises taught to me by my mother. My mother’s influence is paramount to my understanding of feminine identity; her impact is intertwined into each image in both subtle and prominent ways. Utilizing self-portraiture, I am constantly experiencing a “hall of mirrors” effect where it is difficult to distinguish between truth and illusion, as I am both subject and maker. I’m a complicated construct of both the rejection and acceptance of society’s definition of femininity. I’m confronting the disguises that have become a part of my feminine identity while exposing and scrutinizing my own secrets.

Rosana Ybarra: Chimera
“Chimera” has three definitions, each so equally fitting of my work that this word has come to embody what I consider my own holy trinity. One: a fire-breathing female monster in Greek mythology, often read as an omen for disaster. She was a hybrid animal made up of three – lion, goat, and serpent. Two: an unrealizable dream, a fanciful illusion composed of discordant parts – improbable but dazzling, wild. Three: an organism formed by multiple sets of distinct DNA, human, plant or animal.

Chimera – a hybrid monster, an impossible dream, a harmonious organism composed from disparate origins.

This exhibition is a demonstration of my own self-exorcism, and it is a conjuring. I have made a series of chimera. Each individually extricates an ideological fixation, a monster in my mind, via embodiment. And each embodiment serves as a particular offering to you, the viewer. These works I’ve conjured, my amulets, my totems, my votive objects – their intended function is in their name. They want us to know that what we believe is always our own.

Image: Idée Fixe, 2017, approx. 60” x 48” x 16”
Wood, insulation foam, plaster, roofing asphalt, acrylic, sand, epoxy clay, rope, cotton yarn.