Certainty Still Pending | LAMAR DODD SCHOOL OF ART

Certainty Still Pending showcases the work of the first-year MFA cohort at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. With exploration and risk leading this first year of research, students use a multiplicity of materials and processes to express their creative practice. Textiles, metal, clay, photography, painting and drawing all are employed as a means of investigating potential thesis directions. With no definitive proposals established, a consistent theme of community, uncertainty, and inquiry is prevalent throughout. The works on display present the beginning of a three-year long conversation, regardless of content or material. Thus, the exhibition is a culmination of ideas exchanged thus far and they are subject to change rapidly.

Artist Bios:

Gabrielle Barnett is a photographer from Denham Springs, Louisiana. Her art focuses on the journey of parenthood and looks at the unrealistic social expectations of female bodies. The work expands the notion of what a family can look like and speaks of ending an era where society has looked down upon women especially those who are outside of the traditional beauty standards. Barnett is currently based in Athens, Georgia where she attends the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia as an MFA candidate.

Jasmine Best is a true Southern Artist, gathering narratives from her Carolinian family and childhood. The North Carolina based artist uses her personal memories and manipulations of her memories to create dialogues about the black female identity in the south and in predominantly white spaces. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Recently was awarded the Artwork Archive Art Business Grant. She works with tangible and traditional mediums combined with digital means of art making. Her work often depicts maternal figures, each depicting the diversity and qualities that make up the black southern women in her life through several generations.

Eliza Bentz is a fiber artist and sculptor from the barrier islands of Southeast Georgia. She works with natural, repurposed, and found materials to create fine art and objects. Her work is concerned with the intersection of craft history and industrialization and is made as a means to reclaim tactility and agency in a world concerned with consumption and convenience. Bentz completed her BFA in Fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017 and has since gone on to exhibit both nationally and internationally in Georgia, North Carolina, London, and Provence. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.

Sarah Bouchard is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on jewelry and metalsmithing. She received her BA in Studio Art, as well as a BA in Philosophy, from Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC. She is currently a graduate student in the jewelry and metalsmithing cohort at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA. Her work explores the labor-intensive processes involved in traditional metalsmithing techniques and properties of the material itself. Personal military affiliation and military objects inform the content of her current work. Sarah has displayed work in New York City, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

Lucas Eytchison is a photographer from Nashville, Tennessee, who currently resides in Athens, Georgia. His undergraduate education in fiction, poetry, and prose informs his approach towards photography, which embodies itself in long-form sequential projects. In the past, he has collaborated with the photographer Eric Ryan Anderson on the creation and launch of Sunnyside Books, a photography-centric book publisher in Nashville, and also served as Anderson’s Studio Assistant. He has worked on commercial sets nationally for clients such as Wilson, Esquire Italia, The New York Times, People Magazine, and others. His work orbits southern iconography, contemporary evangelicalism, landscape, and subject-photographer dynamics, and he is a current MFA candidate at the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Eleanor Foy is a multi-disciplinary artist currently based in Athens, Georgia. Raised in the south San Francisco Bay Area, the landscape and mythology of California and the American West continue to inform her work. After studying painting for three years at Pratt Institute in New York, Foy transferred to Kansas City Art Institute to complete her BFA in Ceramics. This change in focus was compelled by a desire to work in a medium that spans fine art, craft, and mass-production. Foy has received numerous awards at KCAI as well as the Regina Brown Undergraduate Student Fellowship through the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, and completed a Foundation Residency at Belger Crane Yard Studios in Kansas City, Missouri. She has exhibited nationally, including at the 2022 NCECA Annual Exhibition, Belonging, at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. She is interested in how domestic objects express cultural values, and seeks to unpack the complicated layers of meaning in seemingly mundane images of Americana. Foy is an MFA candidate at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Caitlin La Dolce is a multidisciplinary artist originally from the Northeast Kingdom region of Vermont. La Dolce’s research explores such themes as memory, trauma, toxicity, and the body, through drawing and painting as well as material exploration of plastic waste, scrap metal, and paper pulp. La Dolce is currently one of 27 artists associated with GESTURES (gesturesgestures.com), an artist-run project that prioritizes experimentation and accessible community collection. She is also a teaching artist and accessibility educator, integrating arts education into school curriculums for reactive learners and students with communication disorders. Caitlin has completed residencies at Vermont Studio Center (2019, 2020), 77Art (2020), and Pine St. Studios (2017, 2018, 2019). In April of 2022, La Dolce held her first solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper, Overgrowth, at Soapbox Arts Gallery in Burlington, VT. Selected group exhibitions include An Archive of Feeling at the Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph, VT, and Stay Home/Stay Safe at Burlington City Arts Firehouse Gallery. La Dolce is currently studying at the Lamar Dodd School of Art to complete an MFA degree.

Kate Luther is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Athens, Georgia. Her work utilizes humour, fashion, vulgarity, gender stereotypes and unexpected sensorial experiences to examine the structure of the nuclear family unit. Her practice combines the artistic fields of fashion, painting, and performance. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Georgia. Past works have been featured in New American Paintings, Creative Loafing, The Bakery and Visionary Projects.

Hayden Maltese is an artist primarily focused in the fields of drawing, painting and printmaking. Since acquiring his B.F.A from Alfred University in 2018, Hayden has exhibited in cities such as Chicago, West Palm Beach, and New York City. Producing work that investigates the masculinity complex, he currently resides in Athens where he is a first year M.F.A candidate at the University of Georgia.

Landon McKinley is from the small town of Mardela Springs on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Their work, which encompasses photography, installation, and woodworking, ruminates on contemporary and historical notions of devotional labor, the home, and intimacy. McKinley is a current MFA candidate at the Lamar Dodd School of Art in Athens, Georgia.

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