Manifest: MFA

	Kate Bowen katembowen.com Kate creates videos from diaristic and found material that explore longing, grieving, and recovery. Using familiar language and gesture she examines the earnest and hopeful attempts we make at expressing ourselves as we are in pain. A story told and re-told, a fight, dancers, and sunsets all work to give meaning to the process of grieving, but often only manage to convey an understanding of emotional tone. Bowen's videos question the indecisive process of coping and the potential inherent in longing, getting over it, and starting again.


	Amy Herman amyherman.com Amy Herman creates self-portraits through which she examines how the people and places one considers intimate can inform identity. She translates banal scenes experienced in her everyday life into dramatic tableaux that place an exaggerated importance on the repetition of our most familiar surroundings. Herman plays a variety of roles in her photographs; most notably that of daughter to her mother and father. Through her photographs she seeks to challenge conventional familial relationships and understand how her role within that structure is constantly in flux.


	Alyssa Marzolf alyssamarzolf.com Alyssa Marzolf photographs a large, chaotic family set in the rural Midwest. Her series, "The Walkers", straddles the line between commonplace and the unexpected. Her subjects rarely interact with the camera, keeping the viewer at arms length. The photographs function as windows into the private world of another family. Suprisingly, there are moments in this body of work that become familiar as the members eat breakfast, get ready for work, drive their cars, and play on the front lawn. Marzolf renders the unusual usual while still holding on with a curious eye, recognizing what makes The Walkers so unique.


	Jessica Rodrigue jessicarodrigue.net Jessica Rodrigue uses the detail of a large format camera to examine neighborhoods typically stereotyped as working class. The home environments in her photographs are meant to be a peaceful space where their inhabitants can escape from the public and their place of work. Through showing the railroad and trucking companies as next-door neighbors, storage containers as backdrops for serene parks, and electrical towers that frame the home, she explores how the seperation between the industrial and the domestic can become indistinct. The photographs of the exteriors of these houses that populate these locations show a tenuous balance between pride of place and the moments when that pride is lost. Although the industrial environments that she allows to occupy part of the frame can at times seem ominous, a quintessential American optimism is evident through her ability to show that the residential and industrial environments can peacefully co-exist.


	Katherine Rae Walters katherineraewalters.com Katherine Rae Walters works in the still-life genre, rooted in her fascination with food, eating and the guilty pleasure she associates with both. Walters explores how the depiction of food can become symbols for that are attached to different meanings. Food provides sustenance, nourishment, satisfaction, fulfillment, pleasure, regret, and even remorse. The depiction of different foods brings with it different stigmas, creating a variety of emotions Walters fetishizes in her still-life images. These fleeting moments of visual pleasures are captured within the still-lifes.