‘March Six Show’ to showcase master’s students work

UPDATED: March 6, 2020 at 4:35 p.m.

With a decade of art curatorial experience as the curator and program director at Kim Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, Latvia, Zane Onckule expected her experience at Syracuse University to be routine. But when she visited SU a few weeks ago to meet with the artists, she said all exceeded her expectations.

“It was very interesting to work with the students because, as artists, they’re all very diverse in terms of medium and experience,” Onckule said. “There are painters, sculptors and computer animators. Some have had many shows, and for some, this is their first show.”

The Master of Fine Arts degree candidates from the School of Art and Department of Transmedia at the College of Visual and Performing Arts will present “March Six Show,” an exhibition of their work on March 6 from 6-9 p.m.

Onckule, a graduate from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, is curating the exhibition, which will be held March 6.

“I chose the daylily as the symbol of the show,” Onckule said. “It is a flower that blooms and lives only for a day.” The daylily also symbolizes how fragile and impermanent the various levels of inter-relations and care can be, she said.

Regan Henley, a master’s of fine arts student of computer arts and one of the organizers, said that the theme was common to all of them as master’s of fine arts candidates, especially as they were about to leave the security of the academic world.

“I think that these anxieties really pervade our modern life and also make perfect sense as our position as M.F.A. candidates leading this kind of incubation and safety of an academic environment,” Henley said. “So, I think it was a very natural thing to happen for this theme to appear.”

Tanisha Steverson’s work incorporates four parts, which were each designed on a computer and then printed onto acrylic. Courtesy of Tanisha Steverson

 Each artist is exploring this theme in their own way. Tanisha Steverson, who goes by the pseudonym ColourMeChoco, is using this theme to explore her identity as a Black woman. She said her project is a timeline of Black beauty and the feminine aesthetic.

“My ongoing project “Black•Nis: is my plate empty of full?”, maintains the foundation of Black female representation in the arts,” Steverson said in a statement. “This project takes the audience on a four-part journey that shows the recurring cycle with the Black feminine aesthetic. Hair, clothing, and accessories are highly utilized in the Black Diaspora.”

This is part of a larger project that Steverson is working on. Her art is in four parts and each has been designed on a computer and then printed onto acrylic. She plans to connect them with chains that symbolize the theme behind her work.

In order to symbolize pre-colonialism, they will have a gold chain because gold is a resource in Africa. They will then transition into iron to signify slavery and then back to gold.

Meanwhile, Henley is discussing the relationship that the human body has with food through her work. She is using sculpture as her medium and is exploring the fetishization of the body’s relationship with food. Henley said she hopes to explore the appeal and the beauty of it as well, and how all of these things can be very tied together in our minds.

“I think it’s interesting how these works become a conversation with one another,” Henley said. “Yiying Wang, another computer art candidate, is discussing something similar. Her work is specifically about eating disorders and pressure on social media to maintain these appearances.”

Steverson, Henley and Wang are just a few of the 15 different graduate students who will showcase their work. The collaborative efforts that have been put in, bringing many artists together, are one of the highlights of the show.

“We get to see kind of how our work starts to be in conversation with one another and the similarities between people’s processes even though they’re existing in different departments and different schools and different buildings,” Henley said.

DISCLAIMER: Tanisha Steverson is an assistant illustration editor for The Daily Orange.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, some information about the show was misstated. The show is not about political anxiety. Also, Tanisha Steverson’s exhibit was mischaracterized. The Daily Orange regrets this error.