Wednesday, February 19 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L160
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Our graduate students earning their Masters degrees will present their interdisciplinary work to the public. Explore their body of art, three-years in the making through the development of a rigorous studio art practice under the supervision of a faculty guidance committee, learning to cultivate professional practices that facilitate a sustainable career in the arts.
Fatemeh Fani is a Master of Fine Arts student in the photography area at UW-Madison. She was born in Iran and currently is living in the United States of America. A social documentary photographer, her research on women, sexual minorities, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, and immigrants expresses how in traditional societies and developing countries these groups encounter restrictions, discrimination, and social injustice as they are deprived of fundamental rights and freedom of expression. As a recent woman immigrant to the US, she documents the essence of America through the lens of an outsider—an outsider coming from an islamic country with a distinct cultural background.
Using archival ID photography, Fani explores the compulsory hijab law and the extreme violence it inflicts on women in Iran. Her artwork is meant to speak to the public and to those who have never lived this experience, to conscientiously raise awareness and draw attention to the restrictions, discrimination, and violence in her home country. Shortly after Fani’s immigration to the US, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, was killed by the Islamic regime for not wearing a proper hijab. Amini was not the first to suffer this fate—this has been ongoing every day in Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1977 when the leader of the Islamic regime Ayatollah Khomeini declared women cannot show up in public without wearing a hijab. The lack of media platforms, censored by the Islamic Republic or silenced by foreign media, leaves the world unaware of these horrifying crimes taking place. Fani’s art is that of protest, advocacy, resistance, and hope through the goal of raising awareness. By depicting how a simple object, a scarf, loses its primary function and turns into a means of violence, murder, rape, suppression, and oppression, her project aims to bring light to the painful realities regarding compulsory hijab laws and the impact on Iranian women. fatemehfani.weebly.com
Kate Flake (Decatur, Georgia) is an interdisciplinary artist and MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They currently work with photography, textiles and printmaking to create work about the female body, gender, aging, using photography, collage, and quilting to create soft sculptures about queerness and the body. As a gender-nonconforming person, there is a tension between their external body and their internal sense of self. To relieve that tension and gain a sense of control, Flake moves closer to the body, focusing on details. They photograph skin, pores, body hair, and fingers pressing into flesh, then expose these images onto malleable materials, such as fabric, which are capable of change without destroying their integrity. Finally, the exposed photographs are cut into pieces and reassembled into quilts or collages. On these new, constructed forms Flake leaves threads loose, edges raw, and batting exposed to suggest mutability and the potential for change. They become new bodies that better align with their current state of being. These processes of fragmentation and reconstruction relieve the tension they feel when looking at full, unfragmented images of themself, exemplifying queer transformation. Through their work, Flake can appreciate the beautiful, the ugly, and the human parts of themself.
Flake has a BFA in Printmaking from the University of Georgia and a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Fine Art from Brandeis University. In addition to their practice, they have interned with the Atlanta Printmakers Studio in Atlanta, Georgia, and worked as a Fob Holder and Education Coordinator with Second State Press in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Flake is influenced by their time spent working as an educator in Ehime, Japan, and growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. kateflake.com
Mallory Stowe is a figurative oil painter who holds a BFA from Ohio University and is a current MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her speculative fiction work considers systems of memory—whether in the body, the environment, or society—and how they can perpetuate suffering or nurture empathy. Her characters hold the ecological and social realities of the Midwest landscape, yet, fiction allows for alternative realities and for new ways of moving and feeling.
She is a recent finalist of the AXA Art Prize (2023) and recipient of the Juror’s Award for the Women of Appalachia show in Athens, Ohio (2023). mallorystowe.com
Nika McKagen works in traditional wet darkroom photography, sculpture, and textile to explore the sublime experiences that occur at the edges of worlds, cultures, and languages, representing the moments of emergent belief when one finds themselves investigating subterranean and subconscious spaces. Her research delves into Russian and Greek mythos for how the ascent from the underworld contorts and marks a body in the domestic realm. By using expired silver gelatin paper, her photographs create imagery that reflect the dim conditions of the underworld and act as evidence of mythic and poetic spaces. Her life-cast plaster and paper sculptures finished with a silver nitrate emulsion “skin” emulate the shells of bodies shed that one is confronted with in the depths.
McKagen’s work has been exhibited nationally, including at Candela Gallery and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, and internationally in Italy. She has work in the permanent collection of the Kohler Art Library. She is an MFA student and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. nikamc.com