MFA Connect arises out of the essential prerequisite for us as emerging artists and creative researchers to connect with both international and local art centers, to encounter and share visual methodologies. MFA Connect will not only deeepen and challenge our practices as graduate students, but equip our larger academic communities with new records of interdisciplinary understanding, which will challenge all of us as researchers and individuals. Visual art inspires us to ask questions, – which we may not have thought to ask – formulate ideas, and understand new concepts, through materiality as a form of primary research.
The first in this series of visual art exchanges takes the work of six MFA students from the University of Victoria and five MFA students from the University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus, bringing them together in a group show that will travel to both the FINA Gallery and the Audain Gallery on each campus. We hypothesize that this exchange will highlight both shared perceptions and varied studies in material thinking, while inviting our larger academic communities into a more extensive reciprocity of research, place, perceptions, and visual art.