|
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I often create subjective interpretations of personal experiences with moments and objects in my immediate environment. I replicate naturally occurring phenomena with synthetic materials creating displaced objects and installations. I am interested in exploring the realtionship of the original to the synthetic, the natural to the manmade, and the creation of false natures. BIO: Egg: Daytona Beach, Florida Larva: A period of confusion jumping between schools and recreation Nymph: BFA, The University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida Pupa: MFA study at UTK expected: 2009 Adult: As yet to be determined
I am a klutz. I trip over my words and myself often. I approach making in the same manner. I start out by making a mess and through subtraction I try to isolate an idea. This approach allows both active thought and chance. BIO 
My development as an artist has depended on my ability to stay honest and on a desire to make work stronger than my will. Ultimately, I am constantly finding ways to heal the years of damage due to my displacement by finding a home in my artwork. This body of work is composed of physical, performative, and emotional responses to contemporary culture and my immediate environment. My intent is to form a language that allows me to communicate parallel ideas to disparate audiences. Rooted in the desire to create social change through art, I am using the diversity of my work to set up a battleground for issues relating to gender, race, sexuality, and class constructions. Requia Gray is a native New Yorker raised in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. She proudly received her Bachelors of Arts degree from Spelman College in 2003. This dedicated Spelmanite is now paving her way through graduate school at UT as a graduate teaching associate. Grounded by her mother and inspired by her surrounding environment, Requia strives to make work that nourishes others with the blessings of healing and progress. Hooks writes, “Looking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future” (hooks, Oppositional Gaze). Ms. Gray uses the oppositional gaze to navigate in the broader world and is comforted by the fact that there is power in looking and creating.
These works are a material exploration of phenomena of the natural world altered through perception. Landscape provides the form and plastic material becomes the means with which to investigate my relationship and distance from nature. Amanda was born in 1980 in Michigan. She had an extended period of study at Wayne State University in Detroit Michigan with a few breaks to study in Chicago, Illinois and Burren, Ireland. After graduating with a degree in sculpture she headed down to the hills of Knoxville to pursue a degree and connection to the landscape. She is currently a second year MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where she is also working as a Graduate Teaching Associate. She recently completed a residency and installation at the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, Massachusetts.
This sculpture work begins with the premise of using object & performance to present something visually irresolvable,. A proposition that simultaneously depends on and contradicts the legitimacy of markers used to judge the soundness of reality. My sculpture is heavily imbued with ideas of paradox and futility. Following a few preliminary experiments activating objects through public performance, I made a conscious decision to let go of ideas that were solely intended as objects in favor of projects with specifically performative ends. Craft, design and fabrication continue to play a vital role in my process but they are not ends in themselves, they are the methods of producing scenery, costume and prop. The performance that I am most interested in differs from conventional theater in that it is prepared but not rehearsed. In many cases my sculptures require hard work. Through the performance of the object, physical learning occurs. The unrehearsed activity of learning a new physical relationship (like balance or seeing) can be awkward, but it affords the work unexpected and improvisational aspects. These projects make use of existing languages of legitimacy. Hard hats and orange cones delineate an active and allegedly purposeful intrusion into public space by “the powers that be”. The fake wood grain of mass-manufactured clapboard siding is reminiscent of home and safety, but is also the physical product of commercial nostalgia for a time that never was. It is in the presence of these familiar contradictions that I choose to intervene, inserting the absurd, and paradoxical into the seemingly tidy landscape of reality. BIO Unavailable
RECENT MFA GRADUATES
To view faculty work, please visit the Faculty page.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright ©2003 The University of Tennessee · Knoxville Tennessee 37996 · Telephone 865-974-1000 Voice/TDD | |
