Artist: A.W.A.K.E
Artist: YILU YANG
Artist: SALOME KOKOLADZE
Artist: ADAM HUTCHINSON
Artist: SEOK WUN AU YONG
Artist: LETICIA HERNANDEZ
Artist: HLUMELA MATIKA
Apr 09, 2019 – May 11, 2019
As a society, we lie to children all of the time. The Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus: all stories and mythologies designed not only to entertain, but also to shield children from some of life’s harsher realities. As we grow, the stories change. Some function as tools of control, designed to indoctrinate us into established systems and they’re resulting social structures. Some are simply life lessons meant to prepare. Most of what we tell the youth is meant to protect them; gradually letting a little more of the real world in, but still allowing room for ideas like meritocracy, fairness, and the triumph of good over evil to exist in the mind as hard truths.
At some point though the veil is fully lifted, the wizard steps out from behind the door, and we begin the long process of seeing ourselves, the world, and our place in it, for what they really are. Depending on your background, that uncovering could come as no shock at all. The world forces some people to grow up much faster than others, and it is exactly as they know it to be. For others, it’s a smack in the face, that gust of cold air that literally feels like it cuts your cheek. We all exist somewhere on this spectrum, and as we go through this process, we must redefine things for ourselves. We must reconsider our previously held tenets, beliefs, and desires in order to adapt and evolve. When I came to do studio visits with the Syracuse MFA students, this process is the continuous thread I saw in their work, the connective tissue. I cannot say whether this is a function of where they are in their lives, the political moment we are in, the future we are facing, or simply because this group of artists have been sharing the same physical and critical space for the past three years. Regardless of reason though, at the end of that weekend I came away with a sense of a group of people who were all re-evaluating and redefining something for themselves in order to align it with, or react to, the reality they saw playing out before them. For some of these artists, this questioning was social and political in nature. For others, extremely personal. Some were broad, and others incredibly specific. In some of the work this process is quite overt. In others more subtle, but present nonetheless.