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https://blogs.massart.edu/mfalr/vers/ #massartgraduateprograms
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Vers (June 6 – July 14, 2022) manifests a decade of conversation and collaboration between artists Jonathan VanDyke (NYC) and Francisco-Fernando Granados (Toronto). In an evolving and site-specific improvisation at MassArt’s Doran Graduate Gallery, the artists work with raw materials gathered from their respective studios and found around the MassArt campus on alternate days. The two never coincide physically in the gallery but continuously engage with one another through the material traces of their actions. They build and rebuild ephemeral assemblages together, yet at a distance, freely adding and taking away from the other’s work: a non-verbal dialogue of compositions, forms, signs, and symbols. Vers is a living artwork, a correspondence, a negotiation, a power play, a flirtation, a relationship.

 

VanDyke and Granados work at the intersection of performance and painterly practice, with the former especially focused on gestural mark-making, and the latter on geometric abstraction. Through Vers, they enact a queering of patriarchal notions of individual authorship and push against the idea of the artwork as fixed and complete. Their work reframes strategies from avant-garde movements that have sought to counter the mainstream art market’s logic of consumption. Here, the artwork is not an imposition on the audience or the sum of its materials: rather, it provides a model for creative play, making something within and out of what is already in place. As a studio-based methodology, Vers takes its cues from queer forms of embodiment that reject fixed hierarchies and stable roles. The installation unfolds through a slippery process in which each artist has the opportunity to be both submissive and dominating, or both or neither, to code switch and “find” each other without ever being physically present at the same time. 

 

The artists are present in the gallery on the following days:

 

Francisco-Fernando Granados

  • Tues, June 7
  • Thurs, June 9
  • Sat., June 11
  • Weds, June 29
  • Sat, July 2

 

Jonathan VanDyke

  • Mon, June 6
  • Wed, June 8
  • Fri, June 10
  • Fri, July 1
  • Sun, July 3

 

VERS: MORE INFO

 

Event Details

  • Davit Botch
  • Sylvie Djian
  • Rebecca Morrison

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