FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Ellen Arnold
412-268-3932
ellena@cmu.edu

What: Maydaze

Where: Future Tenant: 801 Liberty Ave.,
Pittsburgh, PA 15222

When: Friday, May 7 – May 28
Opening reception: Friday, May 7, 5:00 – 8:00 pm

Maydaze, a show of emerging artists whose work embraces the subtle to the spectacular, aims to put you under a visual spell. Back for the second time at Future Tenant, second year MFA students from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art promise to provoke some springtime banter with the fruits of their labor.

 

Mario Marzan's work operates in a space between the real and the imagined. With an emphasis on recollection, his drawings fabricate a world where memories are topographically stored and truth is distorted to the limit of collapse. Each one of his skillfully rendered drawings informs the other and therefore diagrams a coherent experience motivated by the narrative he has constructed. The drawings begin to form spatial narratives as the story grows out of control, the chapters demanding a place in the visible world.

 

Carolyn Lambert is a producer of sculpture, installation art, and performance art. Her current work focuses on culture as it takes form within social, economic and agricultural systems. For the Maydaze show at Future Tenant, Lambert will present Potato Stories, a living sculpture/ performance focused on the historical process of dissemination of this staple crop. Lambert will set up environments for growing and dispersing this root-vegetable, and offer stories about the potato. Gallery goers will have the opportunity to take home their own starter potatoes and participate in the dissemination of the potato story.

 

Adam Davies’ current work in drawing and painting explores visionary art and science concerned with utopian and dystopian themes. Davis explains, "I am intrigued by human desire to explain and rationalize our relationship to the world. My work is motivated by the desire to see how abstract concepts can collapse or reveal unexpected results when used in specific images. I want to create visual double-takes for the viewer to think s/he has made sense of the image and then, upon looking again, become confused." ~ A.D. 2004

 

Jacob Ciocci is a 26 year-old media artist originally from Kentucky. His most recent comics, websites, animations, music, and paintings deal with the relationship between consumer culture and GOD. He is also a founding member of Paper Rad, an art collective that sprung out of the Providence/Boston underground comics/music scene in 2000.

 

Blithe Riley currently works in live video performance. Her work explores how meaning is scripted in the live vs. recorded image. Inspired by the tactics/products of popular mass media (specifically music video and dance) her work deals with the codification and discipline of the body through everyday/choreographed movement. Riley seeks to both use and expose the strategies of popular media to re-configure and re-choreograph these movements and the complexity of the narratives/meaning behind them.

 

Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 6:00-8:00 pm. Future Tenant is a project of Carnegie Mellon University and The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, located in the heart of the Cultural District. This art space, which features alternative exhibitions and performances by emerging artists from the Carnegie Mellon community and beyond, is managed by a team of students from the Masters of Arts Management program, a joint program of Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School of Public Policy and Management and the College of Fine Arts.