Opening Reception on October 9, 2015 from 5:00–7:00pm
On view until December 18, 2015
Artist Talks on October 13, 5:00–8:00pm
Please join us on October 9th, from 5:00pm to 7:00pm, for the opening of Residual Utopia; the 2015 Maine College of Art & Design Alumni Biennial at the College’s Institute of Contemporary Art. This year our jury, comprised of alumna Jenny McGee Dougherty ’05, Dan Mills, Director of the Bates Museum of Art, and Lissa Hunter, Chair of the Board of Trustees at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, has selected four artists that represent the breadth of the college’s academic programs, with representatives from our Bachelor’s Program, as well as our Master’s in Fine Art and Art Education programs.
The work that these artists produce illustrates a range of interests, practices, and levels of audience participation. In their individuated practices these artists have identified certain utopic ideologies as having been built on the ashes of that which came before. Ellen Babcock BFA ’84, Cole Caswell MFA ’08, Kevin Goodrich Art Ed ’10, and Carlos Pileggi MFA ’13 are working in fields of painting, photography, social sculpture, social practice, and printmaking.
The logic at play in each of their practices showcases their ability to develop and to problem solve; two traits demanded of artists today. This development out of/away from the rules of art practice is both postmodern and contemporary, as well as decidedly anti-utopian. The parameters laid down by generations of modernists decreed the separation of artistic disciplines for the sake of their own agendas. The rigidity of these systems had within them the seeds of their own demise, and it is from the rubble of those hopes that these artists mine for material, content, audiences, and histories. We have on exhibition what they have built from the residue of their respective utopian legacies.