Wednesday, December 2 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Chazen Auditorium
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.
Anastasiia Bulatova (b. 1997) is a performance artist and researcher whose work investigates the body at the intersection of digital infrastructure, political power, and spatial control. Working across live performance, video, and installation, their practice examines how bodies are rendered, mediated, and disciplined by both physical architecture and algorithmic systems. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s disciplinary power, Gilles Deleuze’s societies of control, they look into how different systems organize, represent, and mediate bodily experience, equally interested in the possibilities that emerge within these systems as glitches, distortions, fragmented identities, and forms of embodiment that resist the logic of those systems. In their ongoing project, Cartographic Struggle of Performing Corporeality in Digital Terrain, they examine the relationship between the body, architecture, and digital mapping technologies, such as during a recent research trip to Belgrade, Serbia, where they performed and documented their performances using 360° photography and Google Street View as both artistic media and infrastructures of spatial control. Their work approaches the body not just as an object subjected to technological and political systems, but as a site where new forms of social relations, political possibilities, and self-perception can emerge.
Bulatova holds a dual BA in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Bard College, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Studio Art (4D: Video & Performance) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. anastasiiabulatova.cargo.site
Emma Harris is an artist and writer from Galway, Ireland, whose current research centers on perception, lightness, and the interface between material and digital images. Drawing from American modernism, Japanese ink painting, and the photorealists by way of cowboys, monster movies, and Godzilla, she uses a painted language of contrast, distortion, and slippage to explore the mechanics of seeing and to bring about an awareness of the quirks and limitations of our own sensorium.
She studied painting and critical cultures at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and after graduating moved to southern Estonia where she worked as a papermaker and book binder at TYPA Letterpress Museum. She is currently a third year MFA student at UW–Madison.
Christian Ulloa is a contemporary artist who works primarily through sculpture and uses humor and pop culture references to explore themes such as cultural spectacle and performative human nature as influenced by contemporary masculine culture. Centered on a use and analysis of ‘kayfabe’, which originates from the long-standing tradition in professional wrestling refering to the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, and the characters presented are genuine, Ulloa creates meticulously crafted sculptures that employ trompe-l’oeil techniques. Produced through a process of mold-making, casting, and meticulous painting, the hyper-realistic sculptures act as performative representations, posing as the objects they are not while retaining evidence of their handmade fabrication. Exposing this ploy of kayfabe in society, the optical-illusion of the work brings awareness to the suspension of disbelief that occurs regarding the performative tendencies that humans display daily and our innate desire to find authenticity within the inauthentic. The work operates under the assumption that there is no complete deception in their depiction, but rather an audience willing to play along, encouraging the viewer to reflect on their role in the spectacle and consider whether a moral judgment on authenticity is even necessary.
Ulloa was born and raised in the suburbs outside of Chicago. He has exhibited work both regionally and internationally, including at Moosey Gallery (London, England), Tandem Press (Madison, Wisconsin), Casa Lu Parque (Mexico City, Mexico), and a recent solo exhibition at crosswalk Gallery (Chicago, Illinois). He received a BFA in sculpture from Northern Illinois University, and currently works out of Madison, Wisconsin, as an education research fellow in the studio art MFA program at UW–Madison. christianulloa.com