"extra/infra" : First Year MFA Exhibition Spring '20
The Worth Ryder Gallery presents EXTRA/INFRA, an exhibition of work from UC Berkeley’s first year graduate students- champoy, Fred M. DeWitt, Emily Gui, Biz Iqbal, Anna Riley, and Nadia Shihab. This show exhibits the culminating efforts of these student’s first semester in the program, with results spanning an array of media including painting, photography, video, installation, sculpture, and performance. The work presented in this exhibition is diverse both in medium and subject matter. The opening reception took place on Wednesday, January 29th, with performances from several of the artists throughout.
champoy, That Which Pales In Contrast To... (or What is The Work and Who Is It For?) (detail), 2020. Site-specific installation.
champoy, who came to the US from the Philippines as an adult, searches for selfhood in a site-specific installation titled that which pales in contrast to. He aims to decolonize his art practice and question the physical, social, spiritual, and political constructs of the self.
Fred M. DeWitt, Performance in front of Mentor Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle, Spirit Catcher, 2019, Wood, gold Leaf, 400 glass vessels, sea water, coffee, flowers, candy, ceramic sugar bowls, and rope.
Fred M. Dewitt asks himself “how do you reference the violence that has been enacted against the black body without showing the black body?”. His work engages this question of representation and historical violence as he examines the 400 year period since African slaves were first brought to this country.
Emily Gui, Untitled Installation, 2020.
Emily Gui questions the built environment, creating work that emerges from the gallery space itself. In her art practice, Gui reclaims found objects and transforms their functions, subverting viewers’ expectations of common items and how they should ‘perform’ in a space.
Biz Iqbal, Mazhab Partitions, 2019. Metal, fabric, leather, wood, mylar, 86” x 88” x 75”.
Biz Iqbal centers his work around narratives, traditional and contemporary, from Afghanistan, where he is from. He plays with materiality and everyday objects in his art, exploring their capacity to express different facets of political turmoil and public memory.
Anna Riley, viewer interacting with installation, 2020.
Anna Riley repurposes glass from Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, NY into lenses/viewfinders. The transformative nature of her art practice stems from her interests in infrastructural histories, as well as the histories of creation processes and trash. Her work explores the way these concepts are intertwined.
Nadia Shihab, live musical performance on opening night, 2020.
Nadia Shihab’s work explores the ways alternative narratives can be found through the rearrangement of fragmented ones. This search takes the form of video, sound, and collage art. Stories of loss, grief, family, and human experience are told and retold in her work, which finds new meaning in unlikely configurations.
Come and see the art yourself at the Worth Ryder Gallery! The show is open to the public Mon - Thurs, 12-5pm, through Thursday, February 13th.
– News story by Worth Ryder Art Gallery Interns