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Spring 2025 Exhibition
Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art Candidate Exhibition 2025
A Kite in the Drifting Clouds: Sokthea Chan and Elise Mahan
April 29 - May 16, 2025
“’Night is also a sun,’ and the absence of myth is also a myth: the coldest, the purest, the only true myth.”
—Georges Bataille, "The Absence of Myth" (1947)
I think that Sokthea Chan and Elise Mahan see the night for the sun, the sun for the night, the forest for the trees, the trees for the forest. Their minutiae are cosmic, and their poems are documentaries. They are always oscillating between the collective and the individual, somewhere among sunrises and sunsets, woodlands and suburbs. And there could be no more important way of being at a time like this. So many myths about the forward march of history have fled from us, and we have realized that the irony and criticality that we expect of contemporary art are not the answers. This exhibition is an exercise in optimism and mythmaking at a time when we crave a new narrative, even in the face of a scorching dearth of belief. Chan and Mahan resolutely argue for the importance of emotionality and attachment. They search and search and have made peace with not knowing, and in that not knowing, they have formed new worlds despite an uncertain futurity. It is no mistake that Mark Rothko called art “a kindred form of action to idealism.” I see Chan and Mahan taking up his call to action.
—William J. Simmons, PhD, Lecturer in Art
Photographs by Mustafa Shaheen.
Exhibition Reception: Thursday, May 1, 5-7PM
