HALF MASTER
RISD MFA Painting 2016
Curated by Nera Lerner   

August 22 – September 6, 2015  
Opening Saturday August 22, 7-10pm

The Painting Department at The Rhode Island School of Design is pleased to present Half Master,
a selection of recent works by the 2016 MFA Class, curated by Nera Lerner.
 
One year ago the artists in this exhibition were invited to begin producing a body of work that would transform them into ‘Masters of Painting’. Our title refers to their current standing in this process.
The ten artists in this exhibition, Rosalind Breen, Danny Ferrell, Syraya Horton, Shona McAndrew, Tristram Lansdowne, Stuart Lantry, Jagdeep Raina, Paul Rouphail, Ziyang Wu, Ping Zheng work across a variety of forms, ideas and techniques, brought together by a curiosity in the transforming definition of painting.
The work in the exhibition reflects a shared interest in spaces of otherness. These range from those of gender politics, technically mediated social spaces, to the corporate politics of architecture. It is these spaces that the ten artists seek to not only examine, but to understand through a direct identification with them, so as to work from these spaces rather than towards them.
The artists in this exhibition make artworks in and about the worlds they live in. They pull their subjects from social media, historic archives, environmental change and the imaginary. They tell stories about what they see or hope to see and in the process ask us to question whether a painting really needs to look like a ‘painting’.