Alums - CCA
Fatema Abdoolcarim
http://fatemaabdoolcarim.com/home.html
artist statement
My work is an investigation of beauty and repulsion, shame and liberation, sexuality and spirituality. I produce video vignettes that voyage into the dark underbelly of girlhood and reemerge in womanhood. At the core of the work is an examination of cultural practices and their attempt to suppress the female capacity
Through video and sound installation a personal story transforms into an exploration of the female identity. I examine external elements like landscape, objects and cultural metaphors that trigger shifts in the body. But more than just physical changes, the work is about the psychological metamorphosis, cultural metamorphosis, and the metamorphosis of identity of the woman. By using formal tools of repetition, duration, fragmentation and mirroring the work is an inquiry into the psychology of a woman breaking out of a fractured body, regaining fullness after re-examining ritual and tradition. I draw the viewer towards disquieting gestures with seductive and visceral imagery as a way to grapple with the tension between the beauty and decay of transformation.
what do you love about the MFA program at CCA?
graduation date: May 2013
I Feel As If She May Be Vanishing, 2012, video, 02:30
https://vimeo.com/42315147
Christine Elfman
artist statement:
In my Anthotype Dress project, silk pattern pieces for the inner lining of the dress were dyed with the fugitive pokeweed juice and put in contact with the pressed flowers and exposed to the sunlight. After seven months of exposure, the fabric retained its magenta color behind the flowers, while the rest faded pink. Since the anthotype is the result of fading, it can never be fixed or stabilized, and will continue to fade with every exposure to light.
what did you love about the MFA program at CCA?
CCA’s MFA program is very interdisciplinary. While my work usually involves photography, it includes many different processes and materials. While I was a part of the photography department at CCA, I engaged with students and advisors from all areas according to my interests: sculpture, textiles, painting, film, curatorial studies, etc. All of the graduate fine art studios are together, and I was surrounded by artists with incredibly diverse practices. Sometimes when I walked through the studio buildings, I was amazed by how each person’s studio was like a world of its own, and as I spent time in it, I could begin to learn its language.
graduation date: May 2012
Christine Elfman, from the series Anthotype Dress Project, 2011.
Cara Levine
artist statement:
I have searched and searched to find and create a portal. A portal to where, I don't know. I am not concerned so much with what comes after the portal--rather, with what comes before. How can I present the possibility of escape all while exposing its impossibility? Work around the physical body, metaphysics, prosthetics, illusion and language has all arisen out of this search. I am working through video, sculpture, and photography to best describe the concepts at hand.
what did you love about the MFA program at CCA?
The program is multi-disciplinary, theoretically rigorous and full of inspiring faculty. I had a blast discovering and taking advantage of all the resources on campus: lecture series', classes in other disciplines, wood shop, metal shop, and media lab to name a few. Its location near downtown San Francisco helped keep us connected to a larger art-making community. All in all, I had a very productive and creatively profound time here.
graduation date: May 2012
Cara Levine, Portal: The Trouble With Building a Hole in the Floor
Christine M. Peterson
http://cmpetersonstudio.com/
artist statement:
My work with photography involves projecting found and collected slides using a carousel slide projector in an installation setting. I may remove the projector’s lens, manipulate the focus, or project onto unstable or reflective surfaces. By removing the projected image many steps from the content of the slides, the installations emphasize the relation between image and memory, fiction, and time; they center the peripheral while imagining what it means to recall, grasp, fade, and forget.
what did you love about the MFA program at CCA?
One advantage to the size of CCA's program is that it placed me among a wealth of differing opinions, varied practices, and supportive advisers and colleagues. The emphasis on theory and the interdisciplinary structure ensured I and my peers coudl have critiques and conversations that expanded beyond medium and material. CCA is well connected in the Bay Area, offering many unique opportunities to meet and work with artists, collectors, curators, and patrons through that network.
graduation date: May 2012
Christine Peterson, The whole of art history as I remember it, 2011.
Ansley West
artist statement
On a recent visit with my grandfather, he described his daily walk, which is dictated in length and duration by a mental recounting of his own autobiographical timeline. He systematically recounts every year of his entire life. This exercise is both painful and joyful, but essential to his understanding of time. I too routinely reflect upon the past, remembering people and places that have long ago slipped away. Time has turned many of these memories into blurry ungraspable images, which refuse clarity....
My work seeks to conjure up the complex relationship we have to memory in both our visceral, bodily and visual relationship to it. Through the use of the photographic within both still and moving images, my work plays with the confusion of space and time, layering and distorting to remove graspable orientation. The images belong to the space of night and dreams rather than to the light of day. They are layered with materials creating a semi translucent veiling of what lies beyond reach. The blurriness transforms the photograph from a record of an event to an emotional recount.
what do you love about the MFA program at CCA?
California College of the Arts has been an incredible program to attend. I have appreciated the interdisciplinary aspect of the Graduate department and feel that more than anything else it has had the greatest impact on my work.
graduation date: spring 2012
