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Dina Perlasca, Portal. Ceramic, 3’ x 2’ x 1.5’, 2021. |
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Lee Sullivan, Deflate!, Acrylic and Latex Paint, Cloth, Balloon, Wood, and Found Objects, 48“ x 31“, 2021. |
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Katrina Chandler, Happy Pills, Digital Illustration, 12”x12”, 2021. |
The Better Show: #Bring Your Own
MFA Show, Spring 2022
April 21-May 14, 2022
The University Art Museum (UAM) is proud to announce The Better Show: #Bring Your Own 2022 MFA Thesis Exhibition, featuring work by MFA candidates: Dina Perlasca, Carlos Lee Sullivan, and Katrina Laine.
The Better Show: #Bring Your Own is composed of three separate installations presented by Dina Perlasca, Carlos Lee Sullivan, and Katrina Laine that imagine spaces where the irresolvable can be resolved. Perlasca is a Mexican-American ceramicist looking for reconciliation between ideal and real domestic spaces using symbols to encode her heritage. Sullivan is an assemblage artist who creates fairy tales without resolutions, pointing at the emptiness in their structure. He seeks to create new forms of optimism and innocence in that emptiness. Laine is an installation artist giving permission to herself and others to take up space and time in order to heal from collective and personal trauma.
According to Austin Martin-Likes, Dungeon Master and writer, “Katrina Laine, Dina Perlasca, and Carlos Lee Sullivan unite in a three-way critique of 21st-century gender roles through a firm engagement with the past via recycled images, materials, and techniques. Together they offer penetrating insight into how the wounds of patriarchal trauma swell and ooze through us all. Each artist #BringsTheirOwn penis anxiety to this show. Whether driven by phallophobia, or classic Lacanian envy, their work seeks to trouble the viewer’s stiff notions of power with the hard-to-face truths that bulge just under the surface. Teasing us into standing up and paying attention, A Better Show erects a piercing message that prods us to the edge of social realizations that we must come to ourselves.”
Katrina Laine had worked as a commercial graphic designer for over 10 years before moving into the conceptual realm, beginning to explore the connections between the commercialization of graphic design and the perception of identity on a more personal or social level. Laine received her BA in Graphic Design from New Mexico State University in 2016 and is currently working as the Student Media Advisor for NMSU while also pursuing her MFA with an emphasis in digital art and installation. Laine has two children and lives in Las Cruces, NM where she also graduated high school. Laine has exhibited nationally and regionally and is the current secretary for the Las Cruces City Art Board.
Carlos Lee Sullivan received his BFA from Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and he currently pursues an MFA at New Mexico State University. He works primarily as a painter, collage and assemblage artist, but not exclusively, and has exhibited nationally under multiple disciplines. Much of his work lingers on tensions of longing, loss, and becoming, in seeking resolution in the irresolvable.
Dina Perlasca is a Mexican American artist from The Paso del Norte Region, where she grew up on the border of Mexico and the U.S. in El Paso TX and Cd. Juarez Mexico. She lives in El Paso, Texas with her three children. Perlasca obtained her BFA in Ceramics from The University of Texas at El Paso in 2018 and is currently teaching undergraduate ceramics while pursuing her MFA in Ceramics at New Mexico State University. Perlasca has exhibited regionally and nationally and holds the Student At Large position for the National Council on Education for the Ceramics Arts (NCECA).
Join us for the opening reception of both the MFA and MA exhibitions, The Better Show: #Bring Your Own and Establishing our Own Art History: The Influence of Judy Chicago, on Thursday, April 21, 2022. 5:30p.m - 7:30p.m. Programming for these exhibitions include a Pop-up Q&A with the MFAs erected for the opening, and a virtual lecture from William L. Fox, Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art on Friday, April 22nd, at 5:30pm.
OutsmART Children’s Workshop with local embroidery artist Bethany Meier, from Queer and Crafty Creations, on May 7th, at 1:00pm at the UAM.
The exhibition will run from Thursday, April 21 – Saturday, May 14, 2021. For more information about this and other free, community-wide events, visit the UAM’s website https://uam.nmsu.edu/
