Hite Institute of Art + Design
MFA Graduates Exhibition
John Clay Annabela Cockrell
John Day Eisey Eisenhardt
Exhibition: May 23 - July 18, 2025
Reception: Friday May 23 | 5-7pm
Artist Talk: Thursday July 17 | 11:30am Cressman Center for Visual Arts
100 E Main St Louisville, KY
UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE
Artist Statements
Annabela Cockrell
“The Work” is a constant evolution of an idealized same piece of work. One where every new work is an evolution of the one before, wherein these previous works are often reworked and self-cannibalized into the next generation. This is to say the work will never be presented the same way twice. There is this temporality in making and installing the work this way, what with the form, the space, the ness of it never being the same. All the while conflicting by being viewed as being the same in the same breath. This also translates to the use of material, using steel and welding in the same way sewing and thread is used.
“The Work” deals with queerness and craft traditions in an abstract way, warping and altering itself by knowing that there is contradiction and switchbacks. This chaos is countered with a strange precision, a fragmentation within an ever growing rhizomic and haptic thing. Within this complex precision, this layered depth of form there is this use of simple materials, overworked to the point of collapse.
John Day
In confronting the tension between visual language and its inability to fully retain or communicate personal history, my work considers photography not as a fixed document, but as a fragmented and evolving dialogue between presence and absence. Using photographic and digital processes, my practice reflects on the shifting role of photography as a personal and collective tool for preservation. As physical images deteriorate, their transformation into artifacts of loss parallels the expansion of digital imagery, where unprecedented volume and algorithmic organization further detach images from lived experience.
Eisey Eisenhardt
I tell people my work is about religion because that is easiest. In the context of poor rural America, it’s more of a synthesis of many things: The loss of autonomy, the evaporation of childhood, the striking lack of understanding that contemporary life presents, the crumbling of the community ethically and fiscally, the contradictory directions of one’s purpose and function, the exclusive doctrine of church and survival, and the home that eludes the person. How is a trans, autistic person saddled with co-morbidities that maintains a vague understanding of family, home, and community supposed to ‘move on’ from confusing and traumatic events? Particularly when those events compound and never stop reiterating themselves in new, and ever-transgressive sorts of ways? What do you do when you cannot identify a sustainable lifeline, not only because of lack of resources, but because you are at that moment incapable of determining any of them? How do you communicate how ‘‘it’’ ‘’feels’’ when there has never been a space or the words to do so?
In this way my work and its characters are the pasts I remember and the tools for future roadwork. How do you turn an event into a figure? You sprawl them out for all of the emotions that event elicits, because that’s how ‘‘it’’ ‘‘feels’’. Carved matrixes serve to etch the event into an archivable trinket, while the print itself serves as a constant, repeatable reminder. Both serve to etch themselves into new and old memories while the liberties taken as a printmaker allow one to dictate what these pasts, presents, and futures could dare to look like given their current status (which is always subject to change). I like looking forward to being able to look forward to things, and so I craft with perseverance and sensitivity to touch and medium so that I may cobble together pieces that not only act as a living archive but additionally serve to contrive the past as I navigate the present and find community in what is around here and now. Ruminations are always subject to change, and therefore these pieces are made deposable if need-be. So that the next re-imagined work may continue to guide the way.