MFA Picks: Matthew Colaizzo, Kristin Grey Apple & Samantha Mitchell

A selection of over 20 prints, paintings, drawings, and video work by recent PAFA MFA graduates Matthew Colaizzo (’11), Kristin Grey Apple (‘11), and Samantha Mitchell (’12) in MFA Picks.

Matthew Colaizzo’s woodblock prints are inspired by the landscape of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area, where the mining industry has devastated much of the natural world. Colaizzo describes his studio practice as “an investigation of the mood, air, atmosphere, aura, light, and spirit of the landscape through woodblock printing, [which] enables me to explore different color and printing schemes relating to ambience of a vista, which is ever changing.”

As a video artist, Kristin Grey Apple creates abstract and narrative imagery as she changes perspectives and timing to show a deeper meaning through the slow unveiling of people in motion, or the sounds of nature. “The lens of my camera and the lens of my eye are the media for my visual work, one rigid and one flexible, both in pursuit, and both protective.  Video allows me to re-present the tension between my eyes' receptivity and my eye's desire to close,” Apple explains.

Samantha Mitchell’s complex paintings, prints and drawings focus on the patterns and chaos that play against each other in nature. Of her work, Mitchell says: “The consistent tension between order and chaos is inherent in anything formed through an organic process. It creates a kind of stability that is ceaselessly in motion, a fabric that weaves the two together into an imperfect pattern that is simultaneously volatile and pensive… I hope to engage this phenomenon in my work by both witnessing and interacting with it.”

Opening reception: April 24, 5:30-7:30 p.m.