Level Up: Juried Exhibition For Graduate Artists

Level Up spotlights the work of early-career visual artists from across the Mid-Atlantic region by presenting the work of current and recent students. Eleven artists were selected through a competitive jurying process from four area institutions: American University (Marie Gauthiez, Lindsay Mueller, Jiazi Yin), Maryland Institute College of Art (Jill McCarthy Stauffer, Amelie Wang), Towson University (Claudia Cappelle, Sookkyoung Park, Tara Youngborg), and the University of Maryland (Elaine Qiu), along with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Bo Kim) and Columbia College Chicago (Kelsey Bogdan).

When viewing a collection of work, we search for common threads among the artists as part of the human instinct for categorization. The artists represented here are learning and creating in a specific time and place, which can incubate certain styles or ideas. Still, they come from different backgrounds and generations, and that common thread can prove elusive. At a glance, the quality overwhelmingly present among the painters in the exhibition is a sense of abstract architectural space, as exemplified by Every Today at Sundown, 2022, by Marie Gauthiez. Amelie Wang’s interior scenes suggest a conflict between external and internal stimuli. In Untitled, 2022, a pair of figures sit together while the room around them simultaneously overlaps and evaporates.

What Does It Mean to Live in a Body

Featured Artists: Paula Dünner, Karen Pazán, and Ileana Rincón-Cañas

"(...) maybe in our bodies there's a whole world of mythology? Maybe there exists some sort of reflection of the great and the small, the human body joining within itself everything with everything - stories and heroes, gods and animals, the order of plants and the harmony of minerals?"

-Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

The one place we will live for the whole duration of our lives is our body. It contains us, it endures so much for us, and in a way sets the stage for our lives. We analyze three artists who look closer into what our bodies can mean for them.