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 is focused on women, sexual minorities, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, and immigrants to express how in traditional societies and developing countries such as Iran these groups encounter restrictions, discriminations, social injustices and 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.
Fani creates artwork to be able 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 country. Her immigration occurred right after Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Iranian woman, was killed by the Islamic regime because of not having the proper hijab. She was not the first to suffer this fate—it has been happening every day in Iran since 1977, after the Islamic Revolution, when the leader of the Islamic regime Ayatollah Khomeini declared: women cannot show up in public without hijab. The lack the media platforms, censored by the Islamic Republic or silenced by foreign media, leaves world unaware of the horrifying events taking place and the crimes committed against women. Fani’s art is that of protest, advocacy, resistance, and hope through the goal of raising awareness. Using archival ID photos, Fani explores the compulsory Hijab and the extreme violence it inflicts for women in Iran. 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 raise awareness about the painful realities regarding the compulsory Hijab and its 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. Her work explores the sublime experiences that occur at the edges of worlds, cultures, and languages, representing the moments of emergent belief when one finds themselves exploring subterranean and subconscious spaces. Much of her research delves into Russian and Greek mythos to explore how the ascent from the underworld contorts and marks a body in the domestic realm. Her photographs are produced by using expired silver gelatin paper, creating imagery that reflects the dim conditions of the underworld and acts as evidence of mythic and poetic spaces. Her practice also includes creating life-casted plaster and paper sculptures finished with a silver nitrate emulsion “skin,” representing the shells that bodies shed as they are confronted with depth.
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