MFA’23 show Optimal Conditions opens at Worth Ryder Art Gallery

Eno Fakile (MFA’23) installing work at the Worth Ryder Gallery

Optimal Conditions presents works of the class of 2023 MFA candidates in their first year of creative research and practice at the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice Worth Ryder Art Gallery.

The exhibit explores themes of contingency and the limits of objectivity through sculpture, installation, video, and performance, unraveling dichotomies between empirical investigation and affective modes of knowledge production; fact and fantasy; visibility and erasure; and inherited traditions and self-actualization.

Repurposing of ancestral mythologies, technological procedures, ordinary objects, and their own memories and experiences, the artists in Optimal Conditions assert that a shift in perspective and an attunement to the subtleties and complexities that exist in both the real world and in our most fantastical desires allows us to thrive in a present tense, one that may never offer an “ideal” state of conditions.

The show includes a full catalog, which is available at the gallery and downloadable here as well.

Due to COVID, scheduling staggered viewing times is required. For more information about the show and the opening, follow this link.

Samuel Wildman installing work at the Worth Ryder Gallery