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From portraits to film to wooden salad, the Block Museum of Art’s exhibition “We can make any two stories touch” presents contemporary art by the art theory and practice department’s master of fine arts candidates this year.
The exhibition, which will run through June 14, features works by all five art theory and practice second-year graduate students: Lamia Abukhadra, Pegah Bahador, naakita f.k., Przemek Pyszczek and Gabby Banks. The cohort spent two years researching and creating art during their time at Northwestern.
Banks said the work she’s making now has completely evolved from her art at the beginning of the program.
Her research involved studying artists she wanted to embody and applying them to her own work. She specially chose living Black figurative painters, including Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Casteel and Amy Sherald, to emulate. The exhibition features Banks’ three portraits of these artists painted in their respective styles, titled “A Portrait of the Artist As His Actual Self,” “Jordan” and “Amy.”
She said the reason she painted the artists themselves was for the work to become a citation of the person she referenced. It also opens a dialogue between her and the artist’s practices, she added.
“I’m a very technical painter, but it has been a beautiful and interesting exercise to try to unlearn those conditioned ways of making and try to change the pace at which I paint,” Banks said.
She added that she is dedicated and loyal to painting — a medium she said continues to surprise and challenge her.
Some of the other artists, including Pyszczek, explored new mediums, such as video and performance, throughout the program. Pyszczek said he has been doing art professionally since 2013, but applied to the MFA program because he felt he needed a “restart.”
He said he appreciated being exposed to many different areas of inquiry and study at NU, which have informed his own practice.
“It’s not just about the research of learning different research methods or engagement with new ideas, but also just finding within myself how to use myself as material,” Pyszczek said.
Through his work, he has explored the idea of legacy and reframing the past.
One of his works in the exhibition, “My Father Winning Gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics (No Boycott Version),” features two screenshots from a YouTube video of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Pyszczek’s father was on Poland’s Olympic cycling team but ultimately didn’t get to compete, due to the 1984 Summer Olympics boycott. For the piece, Pyszczek photoshopped his father’s name into first place.
Another of his works in the exhibition, “Light Refreshments To Be Served At All Future Museum Retrospectives,” is a model of an Olivier salad, composed of wooden diced potatoes, carrots, peas and apples. Pyszczek said he came up with the idea after attending a retrospective for contemporary artist Yoko Ono, where a platter of cookies had a label denoting them as Ono’s favorite.
These pieces were all part of Pyszczek’s newest work, he said. But for naakita f.k., their work showcased in the exhibition actually came from one of the first sketches they did in the program.
Their piece “Porous Bodies” involved a chiffon enclosure with a pedestal and film projector inside. Their work, which they said is very research-based, looks at deep sea mining and the history of resource extraction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For the piece, they used dust from a polymetallic nodule — which is mined from the deep sea — and a sample from a copper mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“I was thinking about how to remove an object, how to remove this extraction of land, from these systems of speculation,” naakita f.k. said. “And so crushing them and kind of giving them a life to do something different was one potential way to do that.”
naakita f.k. said they appreciated the learning and growth that took place with the other artists in the program. In the moment, they said the work felt very high-stakes, since they invested so much of themselves into their art.
Banks said the cohort was one of the most rewarding aspects of the program for her. Although the five artists weren’t collaborating on their pieces, Pyszczek said they were all a part of planning and organizing the exhibition.
They were also frequently in and out of each other’s studios in the basement of Locy Hall, Pyszczek added.
“Even though our work is so different, there’s still all these intersecting threads that connect the things that we’re concerned about as artists and the things we’re trying to make sense of in the world and get through,” Pyszczek said.
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