small refusals: 2021 Studio Art MFA Thesis Exhibition
Design by Will Shea.
small refusals is a three-woman exhibition featuring work by students from the 2021 Studio Art MFA graduating class. Uncanny experiences in Home Depot aisles, found diaries, and mythologies of the American landscape are revisited in sculpture, photography, and video works. Examining themes of the body, loss, and vulnerability, the show celebrates the everyday as a sea of unexamined alternatives to dominant narratives.
Bios
Heather Canterbury (b. 1985, El Dorado, Arkansas) received her BA in Art from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Leadership Scholarship. As a Studio Art MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, she received the Doolin Scholarship for Studio Art, Russell Lee Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Photography, and the William and Bettye Nowlin Endowed Presidential Fellowship in Photography. Her work has been shown throughout the state of Arkansas and more recently in New York and Austin.
Magdalena Jarkowiec (b. 1979, Leszno, Poland) received her BA in General Studies from the New College of Florida. She is an Austin-based artist working in sculpture and dance performance. She trained in ballet and modern dance from a young age and as an undergraduate started making sculpture by sewing and stuffing fabric. The genesis of the practice was a love of sewing inherited from her Polish grandmother, a tailor. As a dancer she has had the pleasure of performing professionally in the work of internationally recognized choreographers, most notably Netta Yerushalmy and Alonzo King. She has shared her choreographic and sculpture work extensively in Austin at Fusebox Festival, Dimension Gallery, EAST, and the Salvage Vanguard Theater.
Ania Mininkova (b. 1989, Odessa, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian-born corporate software cog turned transmedia artist. She is a Provost Fellow and a Graduate School Fellow at UT Austin. At the core of her practice is the tension between the unknowable and the human need for fixed structures and definitions. She thinks about our relationship with the natural world and technology as the embodiment of this tension. Anna has led performative walks and exhibited her work in the U.S., UK, and Australia.