Each spring, the Berkeley Art Museum collaborates with the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley, dedicating one of the museum's galleries to a selection of new work by Master of Fine Arts graduates. This exhibition follows upon a rigorous two-year MFA program that fosters growth in the intellectual and aesthetic aptitudes of its participants. The show gives students the valuable experience of participating in a museum exhibition, in addition to exposing some of the most promising new artists in the Bay Area to the community. The seven artists featured in the 2004 exhibition are Laura Ball, Anastasia Faiella, Amy Harrison, Andrew Martin, Minh Nguyen, Molly Springfield, and Kirk Stoller. Through painting, photography, video, and installation, these artists are constructing individualistic landscapes for their audiences to traverse. As the exhibition title suggests, their work offers the reassurances of familiar territory reconceived for uncharted exploration. Terrains of memory, social interaction, and the natural world resonate with personal, psychological, and political themes. In works that hover between painting and sculpture, Kirk Stoller examines how memory, and forgetting, contribute to perception of the self and the world. His investigations parallel those of Molly Springfield. Painting in consecutive layers, shifting and reversing a handwritten text, Springfield renders the text indecipherable. By concealing its message, she turns a personal memory into an artifact. Andrew Martin explores the overlap between psychological and physical space. His installations balance universal experience with individual perceptions. Working from an intuitive response to nature, Anastasia Faiella utilizes the organic qualities of paint in her abstract oils. Her inspiration is the meditative rhythm she observes in nature's simplicity. In her watercolors and oils, Laura Ball depicts female figures competing, playing, at labor, or in battle. These figures reflect moments of momentum and potential force; the conservation and expiration of energy; moments where grace is gone, and gravity exerts itself. The works of Minh Nguyen and Amy Harrison simultaneously tell stories and serve as social documents. In a recent photographic series, Nguyen situates personal vision in relation to the global epidemic of West Nile Virus. Amy Harrison produces short films and videos contextualizing the natural world as an active agent in human progress. Viewing the work of these artists in a single gallery space affords a glimpse into the rich and varied exchange of ideas they have developed over the past two years, and in which they will now engage the greater art community.
