Second Nature
Parsons Fine Arts
2017 MFA Thesis Exhibition
curated by Chelsea Haines

April 21–29, 2017
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 20, 6–8 PM

Westbeth
55 Bethune Street
New York, NY 10014

The New School’s Parsons School of Design is pleased to announce Second Nature, the 2017 Parsons Fine Arts MFA Thesis Show curated by Chelsea Haines.

Second Nature offers new artistic interventions and observations of a fragile world: a world in which technics and ideology have merged to produce a complex image-landscape in which traditional notions of truth and reality can no longer be taken for granted, and even nature itself has been fundamentally altered by human intervention. In this uncertain and challenging moment, in 2017, these diverse artists, informed by their shared experiences and working proximity over the last two years, are developing methods to critique, analyze, and recover vulnerable images, materials, and relations. Together and separately, their working processes have become another kind of second nature—an almost instinctual critical approach to looking at and making images—formed in the intensive learning and working environment of the Parsons MFA Program. Second Nature is both a commentary on our present and a proposition for other ways of working, exploring how this group of artists has mediated the world around them.

Featuring work by:

Katie Chambers
Yeu Ryang Choi
Catherine Fenton Bernath (cfb)
Francesca Fiore
James Hsieh
Luma Jasim
Shenyuan Ke
Cali Kurlan
Bridget Moreen Leslie
Xin Liu
Daniel Llaria Gaspar
Marija Marković
Haleigh Nickerson
Lydia Nobles
Robert Panichpakdee
Lucas Pérez
Mihika Shah
Gregory Simoncic
Justin Sterling
Yue Sun
Hillary Wagner
Daria Zhestyreva