Graduate students in the University’s master of fine arts program put their final projects up for display at the Krannert Art Museum East Gallery on Thursday. The exhibit is open to the public and will run until April 28.
Conrad Bakker, associate professor in FAA and assistant director of graduate studies, said his students put on the show after completing their third year in the program. The exhibit is a required part of their degree and is supposed to represent their past work.
“It’s a body of work that represents what they’ve been thinking about, what they’ve been making, what they’ve been doing,” he said. “That can be paintings, it can be video, it’s metalwork, it’s drawing, art installations. It’s a wide range of activity.”
One of the artists, Ben Grosser, graduate student, focused on technology’s effect on users with a web browser add-on called Facebook Demetricator . The add-on was displayed on an iPad and removes all numbers, such as number of notifications and number of friends, from the Facebook interface.
“I’m interested in how those numbers get us to do things,” he said. “We are constantly told how many friends we have, and we constantly see how many friends our friends have. In this extension all of those numbers are erased, so instead of saying ‘eight friends liked this,’ it’ll say ‘friends liked this.’”
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Grosser said he hoped that those who use the add-on see how their Facebook experience would change “and hopefully enable a network society that isn’t so dependant on quantification.”
Bakker said the exhibition serves as a learning experience for students that will prepare them for the professional world.
“It trains them in terms of how to showcase their work most effectively,” Bakker said. “(It teaches students) to curate their own practice in a very specific way, not only so that it looks good, but also that it says what they want to say.”
Laura Tanner Graham, graduate student, said despite the diversity of the art at the exhibit, there’s still common ground between the pieces.
“We have a really great collection of artists in the show,” she said. “It’s a nice place to search out those common threads in people’s work and also where they deviate.”
The public opening reception for the exhibit will be on Saturday at 5 p.m. at the Krannert Art Museum.
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