ICP-Bard MFA: 2018 Group Thesis Exhibition

Over the past year, the terms “fake” and “real” have come to exist as mere indicators of political position. As actual facts erode and become conflated with rhetoric, the members of the ICP-Bard MFA class of 2018 focused on the question, “What use is it to consider photography in proximity to reality?”

Through this exhibition, titled Close to Reality, the artists build the futures of reality by revealing the points of intimate connection that we name family or community. They explore the many ways that people come together to give sustenance to each other, blending mediums and crossing borders between nations to point to the ways that our sense of home resides not in a location but in a sense of interpersonal value. For the students, their reality is of the beauty of their peers, and through that they remind us that to come back to reality can also mean that we come back to a world that is worth being part of, trusting, and helping to move forward.