The Department is thrilled to announce the award of a CASVA Twenty-Four Month Chester Dale Fellowship to our doctoral student Erin Dickey. This prestigious fellowship provides funding for a year of independent research and a second year in residence at the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Erin’s dissertation on the convergence of networked technologies and feminist art in the 1980s, focusing on the under-studied artists Judy Malloy (1942-), Nancy Paterson (1957-2018), and Karen O’Rourke (1951-) whose works probe the political and aesthetic processes underlying the “information age,” is supervised by Professor Cary Levine.

Congratulations Erin!

Congratulations to Klint Burgio-Ericson (Ph.D. 2018) on his recent appointment as Assistant Professor, tenure track, in the Art History program at Texas Tech University!

Congratulations to Emily DuVall, who has received the 2022-2023 Hanes Graduate Fellowship (Rare Book Collection Fellowship) through Wilson Library at UNC Libraries. Her dissertation project is “Power and Possession: The French Conceptualization of Royal Space during the Reign of François I.” 

In Myth & Memory, five artists interrogate practices of history-making and history-keeping at the individual, institutional, and systemic level. Beginning with personal narrative, each artist engages a vocabulary of fantasy to make visible that which has been forgotten, obscured, or erased by white heteropatriarchal modes of dominance. Through intimate gestures and acts of subversion, they reframe the lens through which memory is archived to tell new stories from a restructured past. Their work imagines potential futures in which marginalized bodies are not under siege.

Participating artists are the five UNC-Chapel Hill Class of 2022 Master of Fine Arts in studio art candidates: Raj Bunnag, Charlie Dupee, Hugo Ljungbäck, Phượng Duyên Hải Nguyễn, and Stella Rosalie Rosen. Myth & Memory is curated by Laura Ritchie ’10 (BFA), a curator, arts administrator, and cultural worker in Durham; she is a founder and former executive director of The Carrack.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of Maryanna & Will Johnson and The Seymour & Carol Levin Foundation.

EXHIBITION-RELATED PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Thursday, April 21, 7-8:30 p.m.
Opening Reception for Myth & Memory
Free and open to the public.

Saturday, April 23, 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Animation Workshop with Stella Rosalie Rosen
Free; All Ages.

Saturday, April 23, 1-2 p.m.
Guided Tour of Myth & Memory
Led by all five MFA Candidates, with an Introduction by Exhibition Curator Laura Ritchie
Free.

Friday, May 13, 6-7:30 p.m., during the 2nd Friday ArtWalk
Print-Making Demonstration with Raj Bunnag
Free, All-Ages.

Every year the Ackland presents works by the Master of Fine Arts in Studio Arts candidates in an exhibition selected by changing guest curators. The artists will also be displaying their thesis projects at other locations in the Triangle on the following schedule:

Phượng Duyên Hải Nguyễn and Hugo Ljungbäck at Anchorlight from April 9 to 30, 2022, with an opening reception from 4-7 p.m. on Saturday, April 9, and a gallery talk from 4-5 p.m. on Saturday, April 30.

Raj Bunnag, Charlie Dupee, and Stella Rosalie Rosen at LUMP from April 15 to May 22, 2022, with a gallery talk and screenings on the evening of First Friday, May 6.

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Image credit: Phượng Duyên Hải Nguyễn, Vietnamese-American, born 1992, Nowhen, 2022, cotton threads, 64 x 45 inches. Lent by the artist.

Dennis Zaborowski, artist and retired UNC at Chapel Hill Department of Art and Art History professor, passed away on April 9th. He was 79 years old.

Professor Zaborowski was born in 1943 in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up in Garfield Heights with his mother, Stephanie, father, Michael, and brother, Michael. He attended St. Stanislaus High School in the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland. He was a Boy Scout in his youth where he cultivated an appreciation for nature.

From 1961 to 1965, Professor Zaborowski was a student at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He then attended Yale University starting in 1965, earning his BFA and MFA in 1968. In the fall of 1968, he began his tenure as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until retiring in 2015. His courses included life drawing, painting, and design.

During Professor Zaborowski’s career as an artist and painter, his work was shown nationally and internationally. Notable solo shows include the Mint Museum of American Art in Charlotte, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, Duke and Davidson Universities, and the West Broadway Gallery in New York City. His work is included in several permanent collections, including the Mint Museum and North Carolina Museum of Art. He received two National Endowment for the Arts grants during his lifetime.

He continued to engage in painting up until the end of his life, painting in his home and with other local artists.

He is survived by his two children, Daphne and Conrad and his brother, Michael (Barbara) Zabor. He will be fondly remembered for his creative spirit, kindness, and inimitable sense of humor.

A memorial service will be held at The Chapel of the Cross in the historic chapel on April 21st at 1 p.m. The service will be followed by a reception in the Parish Hall. Dress will be casual and colorful clothing is welcome.

Obituary originally published in the News and Observer, April 17, 2022

Do you watch “Is it Cake?” Then you should read this article in the Conversation from Assistant Professor Maggie Cao: “‘Is It Cake?’ feeds viewers visual catharsis for uncertain times” Always fun to be had when our faculty write about popular culture.

Congratulations to Digital Lab Manager Alexa Velez, who is one of the winners of the Frankenthaler Foundation’s Climate Art Award. You watch her video and read more about her winning work at Climate Art Awards.

Visiting faculty member Renzo Ortega, MFA alumni Allison Tierney and Jonh Blanco, and friend-of-the-department Bob Goldstein are all featured in this upcoming group show from the Orange County Arts Commission.

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The Orange County Arts Commission, in partnership with the Orange County Department of Housing and Community Development present HOME? An Artistic Exploration of Housing in the Triangle, which seeks to showcase “home” through the eyes and words of working artists.

The exhibit features 100 works of art by 54 Triangle-based artists and will be on view through April, 2022 at the Eno Mill Gallery in Hillsborough. 

The public is invited to a free Opening Party on Friday, April 1, from 6-9pm featuring:

• Selected written works on the theme of “home” by sixteen Triangle-based writers
• Live music with Soteria Shepperson
• Open artist studios
• Food trucks Yagg Sii Tenn (back by popular demand!) and Maple View Ice Cream
• Beer from Red Oak Brewery
• Kids’ activities with the Art Therapy Institute
• Tabling with community housing organizations

About the Exhibit

In the Triangle, artists are considered to be fundamental to the quality of life and unique character of our communities, but they are one of the most impacted groups of rising costs of living, especially housing. To highlight this issue, the Orange County Arts Commission and Orange County Department of Housing and Community Development asked visual and literary artists living in Orange, Durham, Wake, and Chatham counties to respond to the following questions through visual and written works:

• What does the idea or experience of “home” mean to you?
• What has your experience of “home” been as an artist and person living in the Triangle?
• Is “home” a place of comfort, safety, and warmth, or something else?
• Is “home” positive, negative, or something in between?

Sixty-four visual artists submitted 148 works of art; 26 writers submitted 52 written works. Submissions were juried by panels of visual and literary artists. Works by 54 visual artists were selected for the exhibit and 16 writers were selected to read their submissions aloud during the opening event on Friday, April 1. 

Twenty percent of proceeds from work sold will be used to create an Emergency Housing Fund for artists in partnership with the Department of Housing.

  THE FLOWERS I HAVE NEVER SEEN IN MY GARDEN  

March 24, 2022- 7pm CET/1pm EST
On Mozilla Hubs  

Chris Golden, Mohsen Hazrati, Lauren Moffatt, Sabrina Ratté 

Opening:March 24, 2022- 7pm CET/1pm EST
Exhibition:March 24, 2022 – June 23, 2022
Private Tour: email to register, +49 176 325 10217
Online venue: https://hubs.mozilla.com/vA8xeJa/(activated on March 24th)

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The flowers I have never seen in my garden is a digital exhibition featuring works by Chris Golden, Sabrina Ratté, Mohsen Hazrati, and Lauren Moffatt. Constructed in the free-floating space of Mozilla Hubs, the works on view utilize this programmable backdrop to examine how gardens might appear in the wake of ecological and social cataclysms.  

These flowers, the works on view, are not invisible, so much as hypothetical, speculative. Each work contributed, each virtual garden plot, extends into all the others, creating a network of virtual pathways that unfold sequentially, like the illustrations of an idea that is carefully trying to prove itself.  

The exhibition doesn’t claim to be an online gallery space, or even a 3-dimensional archive, but acts more like a herbarium populated with anthropomorphized flora. A kind of new world is invoked where mechanism and finality mingle, not in the manner of a futuristic cyborg, but in a way where human history and natural history as we know them overgrow into a parallel reality that shares the same concerns as ours. Questions of ecological preservation, identity and its relationship to memory, and the threat of mass extinction are duly addressed. Only here, the familiar solutions offered by our world are placed in parentheses.  

Chris Golden’s Aura Garden, for example, treats of memory—only here memory is invaded by a sort of aural shimmer that translates the dynamics of floral growth into a psychedelic reflection of the calmness in nature. Through a mingling of visuality and sound, the viewer is confronted by the notion that “moments,” even at their most epiphanic, are nothing more than contingent human constructs. 

Sabrina Ratté’s Floralia offers a speculative natural history through a graduated and precise process of segmentation and reconstruction. Simulating the fusion of technology and organic matter, the work plunges the viewer into a speculative future, where samples of extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in a virtual archive room. Through editing and visual strategies, this archive room is sporadically transformed under the effect of interference caused by the memory emanating from the listed plants, revealing traces of the past that continue to haunt the present.  

Mohsen Hazrati, the architect of this Hubs environment, uses the utopian space of the virtual to revisit the history of technology. Taking the ancient Iranian innovation of using wine and other stringents (lemons, vinegar) to generate small volts of electricity, Hazrati has realized a 3D recreation of this pioneering ancient technology. The fruits that spark this device to life are wholly virtual, but have a practical, effective existence within an imaginarium modeled to look like a garden.  

Lauren Moffatt, for her contribution, plays off of the tension that obtains between augmented reality and virtual reality. Her Flowers for Suzanne Clair (named after a secondary character in J. G. Ballard’s disaster fiction novel The Crystal World) creates a strange type of organic digitality which pivots on a process of collecting and digitizing plant specimens through an exchange between the physical and the virtual. Fusing photographic details of flowers with aleatory textures, these fictive plant species are windows to alterity glimpsed through a prism of biological life.  

Staging, ultimately, is essential to what is happening throughout The flowers I have never seen in my garden. Looking at the the digital species the show models itself around, history itself becomes heavy with an unsettling inertia; and the concept of “nature” becomes mechanized to a point where we can almost peer past it, towards a sentient nothingness that defies the logic of temporal descriptors. 

The flowers I have never seen in my garden is curated and designed by George Vitale (synthesis gallery) and produced by Cosmic Rays. 

CHRIS GOLDEN (b. 1988, GBR, https://chrisgolden.art) is a digital artist exploring the energy and vibration of this world. His work focuses on synthesizing a meditative-psychedelic perspective through colour and form. Chris presents a spectrum of projects across physical and digital planes that shares a visual way of being. A reminder of our energy that resides within. 

MOHSEN HAZRATI (b. 1987, IRN, http://mohsenhazrati.com) focuses on digital culture and New Aesthetics, positioning connections to Shirazi culture and Iranian mystical literature. Recent exhibitions include UCL MAL, Los Angeles; Transfer Gallery, Los Angeles; Babycastles Gallery, New York; Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco and SUPERHIGHWAY 2020. He is currently a member of the Digital Art Fellowship program at Akademie Schloss Solitude.  

LAUREN MOFFATT (b. 1987, AUS, https://www.deptique.net/) is an Australian artist working with immersive environments and experimental narrative practices. Her works, often presented in hybrid and iterative forms, explore the paradoxical subjectivity of connected bodies and the indistinct boundaries between digital and organic life.  

SABRINA RATTÉ (b. 1982, CAN, http://sabrinaratte.com/) is an artist living between Montreal and Marseille. Her practice includes video, animation, installations, sculptures, audio-visual performances, prints and Virtual Reality. Mixing analog technologies, photography and 3D animation, she investigates the influence of digital and physical spaces and the interplay between these surroundings and subjectivity.  

COSMIC RAYS is an organization based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that supports the promotion and diffusion of innovative film, video, and digital media art through public screenings, live performance, and gallery exhibition. 

synthesis gallery is an immersive blend of technology and art displayed under one roof, showcasing cutting-edge experiences by new wave artists and visionaries through virtual and augmented reality. Dedicated to exhibiting internationally renowned, well-established artists alongside emerging ones, since its inception, synthesis has garnered considerable attention in the art scene. 

The exhibition is kindly supported by: 

Join the discussion about the exhibition online at:  
Instagram: @cosmicraysfilmfestival; @synthesis.gallery 
Facebook: Cosmic Rays; synthesis gallery 
Website: cosmicraysfilmfest.com; synthesis.gallery 
Discord: https://discord.gg/WjWcqPQtrz  

Image credit: Sabrina Ratté, Floralia, 2021

PhD candidate Andrea C. Snow has published a new article in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft. Titled “Distorted, Dismembered, Diffused: Rethinking the Body in Old Norse Material Culture,” it examines the strange and schematized bodies that populate Viking Age art.

Abstract:
From the late-eighth through the early-twelfth centuries, medieval Norse objects represented the human body in varying states of ambiguity. While the Latin West would establish conventions for representing figures that visibly asserted the emotive expressivity of the face and body to circumscribe the beholder’s expected emotional (and spiritual) comportment, the figures represented in medieval Norse art are lacking in physiognomic distinctions such as defined facial features or somatic expressions of emotion. If their anatomical configurations do not appear to convey behavioral codes, then what could they refer to? What cultural factors contributed to their distortion, and how were they read by their intended beholders? This article argues that such enigmatic bodies did not represent human anatomy as it appeared before the eye, but gestured to a broad, flexible, and supernatural corporeality that transgressed the divisions between divine, human, and animal of Latin Western art and thought.

You can read it online now via ProjectMUSE! (link for HTML-ing is here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47556)