With Pleasure

With Pleasure

ICP-BARD MFA 2019 Thesis Exhibition

Curated by:
Lily Mott

Opening Reception: Tuesday, July 9th, 2019 | 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates: July 9th – August 9th, 2019

With Pleasure is an exhibition of new works by the MFA 2019 graduates from the International Center of Photography-Bard College MFA program in Advanced Photographic Studies.

Artists:
Samantha Box, Ali Di Luccia, Genevieve Fournier, Avijit Halder, Pippa Hetherington, Eugene Lee, Andrea Martucci, Michael McFadden, Tomo Morisawa, and Lauren Taubenfeld

The body is a site: of memory and loss, exploration and evidence, trauma and reckoning, fantasy and substance, the public and the private, conflict and reconciliation, of representation and figuration. The body needn’t be always human, or even living. It can be an idea, a fleeting feeling, a crack in the rocks, cool water, the layering of physical and nonphysical selves. How do we engage with these concepts? If the body is the “flesh metaphor of all human experience”¹, when does the body transcend its fragmented nature to become a whole: body to heart, heart to whole, whole to community?

In gathering together the work of 10 fiercely singular artists, themselves bound together as a body through their experience as the ICP-Bard MFA class of 2019, With Pleasure embraces, rather than denies, the body’s fractured nature. Through examining and reveling in the possibilities inherent in these disparate views of the body, these fragments, when placed in proximity, become facets of a whole, of a collective world-view, rather than pieces of experience without connection.

Having spent the past two years in academic, artistic, emotional and physical closeness, With Pleasure marks the finale of this cohort’s time together. As our futures fragment, each artist will manifest their individual visions of the body, of bones, flesh, organ, a vessel through which life is mediated, a site of questions and answers.

1. From The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, 2011. 

Samantha Box (Kingston, Jamaica) is a Bronx-based photographer. Her documentary work, focused on New York City’s community of LGBTQ youth of color, has been widely recognized and shown, notably with a NYFA Fellowship (2010), and as a part of ICP Museum’s Perpetual Resolution (2017) exhibition.  This work is a part of the permanent collections of the Open Society Foundation, EN FOCO, LightWork, and The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Recently, Box has pivoted from documentary work, focusing on the creation of a studio-based photography practice that explores Box’s intersecting histories and identities.

Ali Di Luccia (b. 1992) received her BFA in photography and video from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA in advanced photographic studies from ICP-Bard.  Di Luccia is an artist primarily working with photo, text, and sculpture.  Recent solo exhibitions include False Clues (2016) at the School of Visual Arts followed by a group show titled The Release of Arts on Site in New York City (2016).  Di Luccia also makes a number of self-published zines that have been exhibited at Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair,  Philadelphia Photo Arts Center’s Philadelphia Art Book Fair, and other various art fairs.

Genevieve Fournier (b. 1991) is a visual artist who works primarily with the photographic image. She received her BFA from Corcoran School of the Arts and Design and her MFA from the International Center of Photography-Bard. Her work currently focuses on exploring the photograph as an object and the variety. of roles it plays in our image-saturated world. The bookmaking process is an important part of her practice, and she has participated in book fairs including Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center’s Philadelphia Art Book Fair. She is based in NYC.

Avijit Halder (b. 1989) currently lives and works in Brooklyn.  His work is rooted in portraiture, the idea of self and others, as he navigates to find a community. By incorporating elements of layering with color, materiality, and memories, Halder’s work attempts to decode and recreate new surfaces.  He holds a BFA in film from New York University and an MFA in photography from ICP-Bard.

Pippa Hetherington (b. 1971) is a South African photographer who has been working as an independent photojournalist with a human rights focus.  Her experience gained over the last two decades is in photography and video documentary.  She is co-founder of Behind the Faces, a pan-African Women’s storytelling project, launched at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg in 2013.  Her work has been published in international and national publications. She established an online photographic archive which is available through Africa Media Online.  Her solo and group exhibitions include Cape Town, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Durban (South Africa); London (UK); Dublin (Ireland); and New York City, and Washington, DC, (USA). She graduated with an MFA from ICP-Bard in May 2019.

Eugene Lee (Taiwan) is a multimedia artist who was born in Eugene, Oregon. He received his MFA from ICP-Bard MFA and a BA in journalism from the National Chengchi University (Taiwan).  Primarily working with video projection and installation, Lee explores the intangibles of art-making, and samples various structures of daily phenomena as analogies to reflect different courses of his internal experience as an artist. Lee had his first solo exhibition, The Plantation Guide, at SLY Art Space (2017) and has taken part in Wallpaper, a group exhibition at Now Space (2017).  He finished his dual thesis exhibition, Splitting as a Daily Practice / Clyde Street Market, at ICP-Bard MFA Studios in 2019. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Andrea Martucci (Born 1994, Detroit, MI) earned her BFA in photography with a minor in sculpture from The College for Creative Studies. She received her MFA from The International Center of Photography at Bard in 2019. Martucci has worked in art education institutions such as The Detroit Public School System and Oakland University, as well as with art spaces such as The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and The Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography. She has also worked with New-York based institutions such as A.I.R Gallery, and as a fabrication assistant at Matthew Barney studio. Working in photography, sculpture, video and text, she explores the redefinition of selfhood in the wake of trauma, frequently addressing themes of gender-based inequality and violence. Martucci lives and works in Brooklyn. 

Michael McFadden (Chicago, IL) explores and celebrates sexual freedom as a form of resistance to multilayered stigma and trauma, both historical and ongoing. He worked within community health centers and social services for over 15 years, focusing primarily on LGBTQ health and the provision of HIV/AIDS services. He brings this process and awareness into his art practice. Michael received his BA and MSW from Loyola University Chicago and is a recent graduate of the ICP-Bard MFA program.

Tomo Morisawa is a Japanese-born photographer, artist, and educator based in Harlem, NY.  He received a PhD in sociocultural anthropology and a MSc in visual Anthropology from the Univserity of Oxford, UK.  Morisawa has shown internationally with Notas al Futuro project in Mexico (2018 and 2017) and published his first photography zine with Dashwood Books (NY) in 2017.  Morisawa has taken part of several group shows in New York, such as at 776 Gallery, Brooklyn (2016) and the International Center of Photography, New York (2016).

Lauren Taubenfeld (b. 1991) is a fine art photographer who focuses on documenting the human condition and then constructing true and fictional stories using a camera. Taubenfeld is also interested in photographing her family and documenting intimate relationships.  She earned her BFA in Photography from Parsons The New School for Design, and an MFA from the International Center of Photography-Bard College. Taubenfeld is based in New York City.

Lily Mott (San Francisco, CA) spent her formative years in Sun Valley, Idaho. Mott earned her BA from The New School in 2013, where she focused on psychology and art therapy, and an MFA from the International Center of Photography-Bard College in Advanced Photographic Studies in 2019.  Mott lives and works in New York City where her work is focused on textile, photography, and mixed media to explore the notions of time, memory, loss, and joy.

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Press

Taking the body as the point of departure, the ten graduating artists in “With Pleasure,” which is curated by fellow ICP-Bard MFA-student Lily Mott, present work that physically and abstractly deals with contemporary life. Genevieve Fournier takes screen shots of shadows that accidentally appear when Local Guides are documenting various parts of the world for Street View by Google Maps. Samantha Box takes documentary photos of members of the Caribbean diaspora and LGBTQ communities in New York, while Avijit Halder, who currently has a solo show at Higher Pictures, captures his own evolving identity as a gay Indian immigrant. Nearby, Pippa Hetherington filmed a pair of hands stitching fabric, that was then projected on a woman’s partially nude torso to create a moving image of a corporeal spirit, which is somewhat metaphorically being mended. Galerie