HOLDING ONTO THE ECHO OF DECAY

Yale Thesis Exhibition

2020

The Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut

"We are living in the midst of the ongoing catastrophic present, in which many of us are mourning and grieving while isolated from our loved ones, yet simultaneously energized by radical uprisings against state terror. In these times, art offers an escape from the violent realism of quotidian life, a blueprint for resistance, and a painterly iteration of freedom. These artists take us elsewhere: to the bar with friends; the electricity of queer nightlife; a crowded swimming pool on a sunny day; the affective space of nostalgia for girlhood; the fashion catwalk. We witness earthly pleasures: flowers in bloom, erotic bodies entangled, trees and the sweet fruits they bear. There is quiet disaster lurking — a neighborhood haunted by its history yet communing nonetheless; an aerial photograph of a scene in which a people and their earth are subjected to the neocolonial forces of death. Then, we zoom in, to the raw materiality of clay, soil, and water. The sheer range of materials and forms within the language of painting testifies to a propensity for bricolage. These modes of assemblage, performance, and representation are ancestral and innovative. This generation of artists inherits the language of painting and injects into it new media, anticolonial politics, and a range of creative intimacies. What are we to make of these experiments in form and materiality during an era distinguished by ecological calamity and restrictions on haptic intimacy? And what of this uniquely twenty-first century exhibition format, in which a show is delivered to us in an easily consumable hyperlink? I invite you to consider these glorious experiments in expression, gesture, and media offered by the Yale Painting MFA class of 2020. The creative and intellectual labor that forms the impetus for this virtual exhibition mobilizes new modes of looking and feeling in our quarantined and screen-based times." — Alexandra M. Thomas, Yale Ph.D. Student in History of Art and African-American Studies