MFA Thesis Exhibition features Becht, LeGoff, and Ottman

MFA Program and Application

The Hite Art Institute is pleased to present the 2017 Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Thesis Exhibition. Held in conjunction with the 70th Anniversary of the Hite Art Institute, the 2017 Exhibition celebrates the University’s very first class of MFA program graduates and introduces the city to the next generation of artists trained in the theory, practice, and materials of contemporary art making.

The 2017 MFA Thesis Exhibition features Miranda Becht, Tom LeGoff, and Marie-Elena Ottman.

Becht debuts work ranging from the discreet object to installation. Taxonomies and rituals form a dissociative dissonance as our longing for innocence is slowly displaced by the decay of our imagined past, the death of our ideal memory of identity and place. The politics and trauma of display and the subversion of patriarchal archetypes merge with the semiotic potential of kitsch and domesticity as feminist identity icons in a simulacra that she deftly casts from two sides of the same coin, the self and the other.

LeGoff’s project is concerned with disparity and reconciliation. His photographic cabinet cards recreate the traces of a non-existent town destroyed by either natural disaster or human design. This parafictional no-place exists somewhere between historical recuperation and artistic fabrication, a split identity that reflects the photographic medium’s capacity for both documentation and deception.

Ottman’s work takes up a bifurcated media practice. Her organic and botanical forms appear to be both handmade and naturally occurring material. She uses these in-organic objects to explore themes of human connectivity, communication, and labor. Her work is particularly invested in the experience of immigration, migrant labor, and translation, which Ottman sews together in her plantlike constructions.

The 2017 MFA Thesis Exhibition is on view at the Cressman Center for Visual Arts from April 25th to May 27th, 2017. An opening reception will be held Friday, April 28th from 6-8pm.