Contact:
Eric Sloss
412-268-5765

For immediate release:
March 15, 2006

Carnegie Mellon's Regina Gouger Miller Gallery Presents Master of Fine Arts Student Exhibition

PITTSBURGH—"The Pittsburgh Banal," the 2006 Carnegie Mellon University School of Art Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Thesis Exhibition, will open with a reception and performances from 5 to 8 p.m., Friday, March 24 in the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery on the Carnegie Mellon campus. The exhibit runs through April 23.

Susanne Slavick, head of the School of Art, praises the success of this year's MFA graduates. "Their success contributes to Carnegie Mellon's standing among the top 10 MFA programs in the nation. Given this stature, their achievement, and the camaraderie and humor they have shared, the exhibit title's punning allusion to 'biennial' is, not surprisingly, tongue-in cheek. It is an invitation to anything but banality!"

Featured in this year's exhibition are MFA candidates Matt Barton, William Cravis, Takehito Etani, Jesse Hulcher, Thomas Sturgill and Tiffany Sum. The students will give talks at the gallery at noon: Cravis and Hulcher will speak on Tuesday, April 4; Barton and Etani will deliver talks on Wednesday, April 5; and Sturgill and Sum will speak on Thursday, April 6. All events are free and open to the public.

For "The Pittsburgh Banal," Barton created a new installation, described as "a bewildering simulation of a collapse of time and space that merges traditional natural history museum dioramas with popular culture entertainment, inspired by Chuck-E-Cheese animatronics and rural American folk art." The work invites viewers to explore and interact with an overtly physical representation of the metaphysical.

Cravis will present "Materiality," a series of sculptures that represent the dividing line between two distinct bodies of sculptural work he pursued while at Carnegie Mellon.

"Pimp my Heart" is the title of Etani's planned performance, which uses an invented Heart Beat Bass Booster (HBBB) system to amplify the heartbeat of a car driver. Through a real-time interface with an aftermarket automobile audio system, the performance achieves an ultimate unity between car and driver. The performance will be staged during the opening reception on March 24.

Hulcher's deliberately self-deprecating stance positions his work as an exploration of humor as well as of the idea and convention of amateur home videos. "Being a true success is hard work. Becoming a failure is easy. My current video work sees me seeking to fail," said Hulcher. "I try to fail compositionally, technically, conceptually and creatively. I want to become the most successful failure that I can be."

For this exhibition, Sturgill has constructed "slightly weird" models of Pittsburgh architecture that provoke contextual confusion. The work is a study of close aesthetic experience with the buildings of the city, exploring the intrinsic attributes of architecture as object.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Sum's work is rooted in the practice of experimental theater performance. According to the artist, "The manipulation of time, the reflexivity of space, the attention to the body and the cyclical structure of narrative inform my interests in staging participants as performers." These over-arching ideas are expressed through specific acts and events. In this exhibit, she evokes urban street experiences through interaction with a constructed platform.

The Regina Gouger Miller Gallery is open from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Visitor parking is available in the East Campus Parking Garage, off Forbes Avenue just east of the Morewood Avenue intersection.

Exhibitions at the Miller Gallery are supported in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania), individual sponsors, the School of Art and the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon.

For more information about the Master of Fine Arts Student Thesis Exhibition, visit www.cmu.edu/millergallery or contact Regina Gouger Miller Gallery Director Jenny Strayer at 412-268-3877 or jstrayer@andrew.cmu.edu. For more information on the College of Fine Arts, contact Eric Sloss at 412-268-5765 or ecs@andrew.cmu.edu.