The Specullector

Becky Alprin (MFA, Maryland Institute College of Art)

Becky Alprin’s sculptures reference architectural models, urban design, and landscapes in imagined three-dimensional spaces. Through a minimal reduction of colors and materials — black and white cut acrylic — Alprin creates miniature histories of the human intervention in the natural world, the density of urban spaces, and the often ephemeral quality of human structures.

Reid Bingham (BFA, Rutgers University)

Using a “single use” camcorder, Reid Bingham produces video that represents the ephemeral nature of the medium and a commentary on the current state of the technology—ubiquitous and disposable. By attaching video cameras to moving machines like car hubcaps and bicycle wheels, Bingham recovers some of the strategies of Dadaism by using intentionally “low-tech” inversions of commonplace image-making technology. Bingham’s videos surprise and delight by recording the camera’s random and impersonal view of motion.

Christina Empedocles (MFA, California College of the Arts, San Francisco)

Christina Empedocles employs realist and trompe-oeil techniques with found imagery to create paintings that renew the question of representation, illusion, memory, loss, and nostalgia in contemporary painting. Her paintings show objects and imagery detached from their sources, but recalled and reassembled in convincing imaginary spaces.

Adam Frezza (MFA, University of Florida)

Adam Frezza’s paintings and drawings examine the links and loopholes of science, technology, and religion. By referencing objects often considered useless or trivial, Frezza playfully creates theoretical machines that suggest both maps of magical parallel universes and plausible schematics of hidden correspondences.

Andrea Land (MFA, San Francisco Art Institute)

Andrea Land’s luminous photographic portraits of young girls in domestic settings reveal a world of curiosity, innocence, and vulnerability. While the imagery suggests childhood introspection caught between the innocence and self-awareness, the pictures also hover between the beautiful and the grotesque, the private world of childhood fantasy and reality.

David Linneweh (MFA, Southern Illinois University)

Employing a combination of line drawing and oil painting techniques on wood panels, David Linneweh deconstructs and reconstructs American idealism in landscapes and buildings. The scenes are shown in transition – caught between demolition and refurbishment – revealing the cycle of urban sprawl and cultural recomposition.

Sebastian Martorana (MFA, Maryland Institute College of Art)

Through his conceptual series, Un-commissioned Memorials, Sebastian Martorana uses marble and granite to critique the function of memorials. His work reveals a keen understanding of the interplay of artifice and the artificial and the traditional function of memorials: creating stable icons of memory detached from history or real events. He shows how the codes of memorials, which we know mainly in stone, can be appropriated to create “memorials” that may be completely fictive and artificial, but thoroughly convincing.

Jimmy Joe Roche (MFA, Maryland Institute College of Art)

Jimmy Joe Roche’s hand-cut and painted paper wall sculptures create a striking contemporary mythology through a series of new cultural totems. His visual language draws from traditional American and Eastern meditative symbols rechanneled through today’s cultural landscape. The works are painstakingly hand-crafted and symmetrical, requiring a long process of repetition, cutting, weaving, and painting, and embody the artist’s contemporary mantra.

Matthew Woodward (MFA, New York Academy of Art)

Focusing on process and movement, Matthew Woodward’s works in graphite on paper serve as a synthesis between drawing and painting, objects and time. Capturing the simple presence of architectural details from historical buildings in New York, Woodward focuses on the process of drawing and the fluidity between surface, ground, and object. The record of the act of drawing and the drawing that appears seem natural in both mastery and innovation.