2020 MFA Thesis Exhibition: Serene Blumenthal

“My practice is a combination of research and personal processing. I begin by drawing connections between the present and the past, the mythological and the mundane. The thread through my work follows my interest in language and cultural memory. In my endless fascination with the construction of history, objects and identities, I am interested in conglomerate forms; creating objects, videos and installations that approach an aggregation of feelings, gestures, and poetics. My art generates scenarios and subjectivities that use beauty, bluntness, fakeness, and irreality to disorient expectations. I am drawn consistently to poetic language that interrupts notions of linearity. My work is in dialogue with the perishable and the monumental, asking who and what is remembered and how? I want to reconsider how space, time and ground are culturally constructed.

“In a poetic dissolution of what orders what, text is reorganized on a plane of fabric. Registering the whole and the fragment, the calligram is remade as a warped grid of potential cross sections. The line and color of these works emphasize repetition and difference, along with imperfections.

“We obsess over Sappho’s poetry, hoping to counter the legacy of the epic with that of the fragment. The lost bits that will never be salvaged, now I make the unsalvageable. On this plane of satin, I have placed phrases, letters and words that are personal beliefs, statements, or incantations. With these wall hangings that make up the majority of my online thesis show, I wanted to fashion puzzles as a way to process reality and metaphor. These pieces are poetic externalizations, where language and letter dissolve and reform. In adding images, including ornamentation, hand dying/painting, incorporating stains a top found fabric, I hope the viewer will experience bits of angst, bits of love, and bits of loss within this work.”