Carnegie Mellon University
March 21, 2012

Press Release: CMU Students To Transform Bakery Square Into Art Exhibit and Fundraiser March 30

Contact: Lauren Goshinski / 412-268-1533 / laurengo@andrew.cmu.edu

Bakery SquarePITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University Master of Fine Arts (MFA) and Master of Arts Management students will turn Bakery Square’s first floor into a large-scale art exhibition and fundraiser to showcase the annual first- and second-year MFA show and celebrate Future Tenant Gallery’s 10th anniversary on Friday, March 30.

The opening event from 7p.m. to midnight features the MFA Exhibition “Extra Fancy,” local bands and DJs, an art auction, delicious food, an open bar and plenty of entertainment. Advance tickets are $15 for students and $25 for the public and are available at www.futuretenant.org. All proceeds support Future Tenant’s 2013 exhibition season.

“Extra Fancy" features new artwork by MFA students exploring a wide range of topics surrounding human/non-human relationships and immersive experiences with respect to technology, nature, fantasy, and the supernatural. This eclectic group of artists is interested in negotiations between the virtual and the real, expanding the boundaries of art, technology and audience interactivity. Sculpture, video, sound, performance, installation, psychic mediums and a WWF-meets-contemporary-robots wrestling match give form to their concerns and cover more than 10,000 square-feet of space.

“Extra Fancy” will continue through April 13 and is free and open to the public. Artist talks are scheduled from 6 to 9:30 p.m., April 5.

“Artists need large, flexible venues to create ambitious projects and communicate with diverse audiences. Bakery Square has provided Carnegie Mellon MFA students a great opportunity for the second year in a row to create and showcase works that are not only challenging in both scale and concept, but accessible to people outside traditional art circles,” said Bob Bingham, associate head of CMU’s School of Art.

For more information about “Extra Fancy,” visit www.cmu.edu/art

About the Artists:

  • Scott Andrew creates multi-sensory, immersive experiences that are confrontational, visceral and absurd; referencing prelapsarian longing, futurist science fiction, and surrealist fantasies that ultimately emerge as post-gender performance.
  • Carl Bajandas presents viewers with objects that, through the use of motion and interaction, are given voice and narrative.
  • Elizabeth Buschmann questions ideas of what is “natural” by facilitating the transport of several live Asian Carp to the Pittsburgh community so individuals can consider their local ecology in relation to an “invasive species”; creating tension between presumed human responsibility and direct environmental recourse.
  • As a Colombian artist living in Pittsburgh, Felipe Castelblanco explores participation and geo-poetics through site-specific interventions, video, interactivity and networked installations. His ongoing project, “Anthem,” approaches nationalism as a symbolic territory by playing unofficial versions of national anthems through reactive sound devices.
  • Oreen Cohen’s large-scale sculpture, “Between You, Me and The Wall,” is a politicized evocation of the economic history of Bakery Square’s former life as the Nabisco Factory. Once the exhibition is over, “Between You, Me and The Wall” will evolve into a public art project at various locations throughout the Rust Belt region.
  • Craig Fahner’s electronic and sound-based work examines negotiations between the virtual and the real, the ubiquitous and the unlikely.
  • Steve Gurysh investigates how uncanny experiences can help shape people’s attitudes toward economies both global and cosmic by embedding devices that interact with our natural environment with elements of historical narrative and myth-making.
  • Yun Mi Her’s video and new media projects explore her own desire for images and the compulsion of image making.
  • Luke Loeffler’s videos and sculptures respond to the influence, consumption and unexamined development of technology by colliding the manufactured and the natural, indoors and out, and reality with a quixotic desire for escape, resulting in paradoxical compromises.
  • Holli McEntegart, a visiting student from New Zealand, creates performances based around ongoing collaborations with local subcultures: conflating real and imagined experiences with the assistance of psychic mediums, barbershop quartets, friends, family and strangers on opposite ends of the world.
  • Dan Wilcox is an artist, musician and engineer interested in expanding the boundaries of art and technology in the field of live human computer performance.
  • Erin Womack creates multimedia work in printmaking, film, and performance that represent a series of imagined worlds that reflect the chaos of human experience and mnemonic place making.


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Pictured above is a scene from Bakery Square.