Alums - Parsons
Sylvia Hardy
artist statement
With a background in art and anthropology, I use these two mindsets to examine the relationship between the image and the physicality of landscape. Through process and document, I emphasize the physical action of “taking photographs” from a landscape. I can often be found working in National Parks throughout the United States. Recent works have been exhibited in the US, China, and Japan.
what do you love about the MFA program at Parsons The New School for Design?
Parsons The New School for Design challenges students to learn as much from New York City as from within the school’s walls. The faculty helps each class create a critical yet relaxed community for critique. With the program’s untraditional seven semester format, I loved the three summers that are spent working intensely in the studio with weekly visits from innovative artists and curators.
graduation date: December 2012
Sylvia Hardy, The West
Joy McKinney
http://www.jmckinneyphoto.com/
artist statement for First Glance
This piece shows a Korean woman painting herself black using black pigment paint as she is walking the streets of New York City. It embraces its full potential revealing the crowd’s reaction to her ethnic transformation, in culture and time.
The original motivation for this work came to me after a series of self-transformation photographs I did to show my doubts about my self-esteem and my cultural identity as a black woman. I felt I needed to explore this deeply rooted introspective conceptualization of my own identity and transcend it through the transformation of another being into a black person regardless of gender.
what do you love about the MFA program at Parsons The New School for Design?
Parsons has helped me to grow as an artist. Through rigorous course studies and faculty feedback I have developed skills to help me formulate new ways of looking at and perceiving art. Parsons has also challenged me to think outside of the box, and push through my own limitations. The education I have received thus far has been by far the best educational experience.
graduation date: August 2013
Joy McKinney, First Glance, Photographic C Print, 16x20, 2011.
Niv Rozenberg
artist statement
The work Automonuments focuses on high-rise buildings, specifically skyscrapers, as a phenomenon of modern life. In this work, I use photography to isolate visual perspectives of these buildings, recording them while fragmenting the habitual sight of the city in order to construct a new vision, a de-naturalized view of my surroundings. This exaggerated vision allows me to break the visual and spatial congestion of the city and to point upward, at what may have been overlooked. Through this work, I am able to transform our visual experience of the city into a hyper-realistic encounter with these symbols of contemporary life. Digital manipulation of buildings allows me to create an archetypal form, isolated from function and separated from the city's total urban structure. Duplicating and stitching one level of a building to another emphasizes the tension between form and function as well as between the individual and the global. By doing so, the work shows the uniformity of the architectural structure and implies that of the inhabitants within. This work does not document reality but reconstructs it, creating a view that cannot be seen, an intensification of reality.
what do you love about the MFA program at Parsons The New School for Design?
Parsons’s unique structure of seven semesters allows its students to be continuously engaged with their practice. Even though the summer can be quite intense, it takes off some of the pressure during the year, and allows the students to have more day-to-day interaction with their work. Besides all that, Parsons has great faculty and top of the line facilities.
graduation date: 2011
Charlie Rubin
http://charlierubinstudio.com/
artist statement
My work currently explores the consequences of contemporary culture and the play between the artificial and real.
what do you love about the MFA program at Parsons The New School for Design?
- Diverse instructors that are practicing artists with real world experience
- Top of the line facilities, studios, and equipment share program
- Fosters independent motivation
- New York City
graduation date: September 2012
Kate Stone
artist statement
My recent work employs rules, rituals and games to explore the notion of home, from the intimate, static spaces of memory to the ever-changing city block. In an effort to exert control over and impose order on my subject matter, I reduce time and space to quantifiable components that can be taken apart and reassembled into something new and unfamiliar.
what do you love about the MFA program at Parsons The New School?
The intensive summer semesters allow us to focus fully on our studio practice and working through seven semesters straight teaches us how to push through periods of frustration. The faculty are challenging and encouraging, and The New School as a whole has wonderful resources to offer.
graduation date: August 2013
Kate Stone, "Monument" from The Wholly Human Security of Two Earth-Clotted Hands (or How I Learned to Accept that Things Would Never be the Same).