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Early chemists believed these were the elements of life and reality, and when surrounded by them, it’s not hard to see why. Pieces that involve any of the four elements in any way, by medium or subject, were eligible for this inaugural online show. Entries are open to all original 2-D or 3-D artwork. MFA will display selected works online in Curve Gallery from October 15 through November 30, 2020. Show Chairs: Richard Niewerth and Wil Scott.
Associate Professor of Studio Art at the College of Southern Maryland, Philadelphia, PA
Yikui (Coy) Gu, born in 1983 in Nantong, China, emigrated to the United States at the age of seven, and grew up in Albany, NY. He has a BFA from Long Island University and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He has exhibited his work nationally in New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Boston, and St. Louis; and internationally in London, Berlin, and Siena, Italy. He has been an, artist in residence at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and has been reviewed in the Washington Post, KunstForum International, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Yale Daily News. His work has appeared on the cover of the Lower East Side Review, and in Fresh Paint and Art Maze. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Art Library (NYC), the Siena Art Institute (Siena, Italy), Camden County College (Blackwood, NJ), and numerous private collections. He resides in Philadelphia and teaches as Associate Professor of Studio Art at the College of Southern Maryland. In his time off he enjoys traveling, good Belgian beers, and keeping up to date as a sneakerhead. The bulk of his time, however, is spent in the studio where he is currently plotting his takeover of the international art world, while remaining mostly harmless.
I want to thank the Maryland Federation of Art for the opportunity to review and select the artworks for the exhibit Elemental: Earth, Fire, Water, Air. Jurying an exhibit is never easy, as difficult choices always have to be made. When presented with over 500 submissions in a variety of media and subject matter, the task is that much harder. I also want to thank all the submitting artists for their hard work. Whether your work was accepted or not, know that what you do is important within the larger cultural discourse, especially at a time like now. Every artist brings their own unique perspective, and my own subjectivity in jurying this exhibit should not discourage you from continuing and pushing your studio practice further. In selecting the works for this exhibit, my thoughts were primarily on how the chosen works exemplified the core, essential aspects of their respective mediums or subject matter- how they reflected the elemental qualities of each endeavor, or art-making in general. Additionally, I also wanted to extend that notion out to artworks that conveyed the elemental aspects of life, the world, and the lived experience. I wanted the works to address the here and now, the current world we all live in, and to eschew spectacle. The specificity of a lived moment can often be the gateway to the universal. Our individual experiences, while wholly unique to ourselves, if genuinely expressed, can be understood by someone halfway across the world, or separated by millennia. Pandering for mass appeal does not make one’s art timeless, adhering to one’s own true vision does. In this way, the selected works all reveal something elemental about us, our innate human nature, and our relationship to the world. The moment captured in Desert Twilight is instantly recognizable to anyone who has laid eyes on a sunset, even if one has never been to the desert. The introspection expressed in The Ride can be empathized with by anyone who has yearned to reach their destination, especially at night. The delicate subtleties found in Nispero perfectly captures the fragility, and by extension, the brevity of life. The clever amalgamation of materials in Grain – Delmar Blvd. explores the philosophical underpinnings of our physical world. And Greynolds Park 200 pushes the material and tactile range of painting, while serving as a metaphor for the chaos that is nature. In essence these works all conveyed what is elemental in the world, and in us.