feast famine

Exhibition Info
Recent work by PAFA alumni Read Lockhart, Mary McCann, and Tiffany Tate, recipients of the 2015 MFA Faculty Exhibition Award

feast famine is a collection of encounters. It examines accumulation and the pivotal relationship between a solitary experience and the collective, symbiotic whole. Fragments prompt desire and an endless hunt for balance, offering an immersive mirage. Cycles in nature, the oscillation between abundance and deprivation, and intuitive behavior prompt us to consider: At what point do two perimeters begin to encircle one another?

D. Read Lockhart was born in Lake Bluff, Illinois. He is the son of photographer, woodworker, and designer David L. Lockhart, and the grandson of the late American wildlife painter James Lockhart. After receiving a bachelor of arts degree in the classics from St. John's College in 2000, Read spent years traveling and living abroad before choosing to continue in the visual arts tradition of his father and grandfather before him and received his MFA from PAFA in 2014. Read studied drawing and painting through a series of apprenticeships in Florence, Italy and New York. He currently lives in Philadelphia and says his work "celebrates the rich tradition of narrative painting, reawakening iconic and nuanced devices from from the past, however, with a departure. Within each scene, a collaboration between the figures is implied, though they fail to truly interact and relate."

Mary McCann was born in Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, and lived throughout U.S. military bases in the south as well as in Seoul, Korea. Her works range in a variety of media from sculpture, drawing, and painting. She received her BFA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an MFA from PAFA in 2014.  She currently lives and works in the Philadelphia area. McCann states that "the moment of metamorphosis is paramount to my work, provoking a process of building and transformation. The work is framed with humor, lightness to a dark situation inviting the viewer to examine their own approach to cycles of highs and lows. There is a compulsion for balance from one terminus to another."

Tiffany Tate is from Springfield, Illinois. She received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Printmaking in 2010 and a Bachelor’s of Art in Art History in 2012, both from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. In 2014, she completed her Master of Fine Arts at PAFA. Tate has exhibited work in cities including New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. She currently lives and works in Philadelphia. Tate says she works with subjects that "present confrontations through their relationship to the viewer via scale and spatial orientation. Through this confrontation, I hope to reveal a mental space where physical landscapes become equated to internal ones and the desire to touch, look, discover, and relate reconfirms the symbiotic nature and desire for intimacy between the viewer and the work and consequently, the viewer and their worldly surroundings, both animate and inanimate."