Bryan Krueger is 22 years old and notices eerie parallels between himself and Michael Scott from The Office.

MOSSLESS: How was your experience with your mentor, Kathy Ryan?
BRYAN KRUEGER: It’s really funny to think about how one transitions from thinking about an idea as an object into experiencing it and, in turn, making it part of their reality.  When I first digested the fact that I had been given the opportunity to work with Kathy Ryan I wasn’t sure how I could assimilate that into normality.  I let that get to my head. When I visited the New York Times building for the first time, it felt like I was in some surreal 80’s movie montage where some college student couldn’t quite find their bearings in the fancy corporate building – I went to the wrong front desk, I dropped my portfolio, I couldn’t figure out the elevators (hint: the buttons are on the outside). But once I got to the right floor Ms. Ryan welcomed me warmly and gave some of the most direct critique I’ve had – all with a personable and encouraging touch.  Her approach reminds me a lot of Penelope Umbrico’s, who teaches at SVA. I can credit my thesis advisor, Barbara Pollack, with breaking me out of my comfort zone and forcing me into work that meant more to me than ever before, while I credit Kathy with focusing my divergent rampages (caused by excitement) within that first 20-minute meeting.  I was pleased to find her consistent enthusiasm and support throughout the subsequent meetings we held.

ML: Can you tell me something about your work and how you exhibited it? (click here to see how Bryan exhibited his work)
BK: Gladly – I guess I can start by saying that the work tends to tiptoe on the line between illusion and disillusion. The subjects of the photographs I’ve been making are either directly mitigated through digital interventions or are repeated through drawing.  In either case, I am interested in harkening in the viewer the act of looking at this flat thing that has the immense power to embower the viewer in a displacing illusion. I like the idea of enacting the viewer’s gaze in the completion of a composition that has missing parts. I became really interested in this idea of projecting personal counterparts onto a photograph during my time working at a photo lab in San Francisco. Mounting slides and trimming prints increasingly made me feel disillusioned from the actual content of imagery by the sheer amount I was ingesting that I began placing myself, the people I know and the places I’ve been into the pictures.  Suddenly, someone’s 2-month African safari turned into a Krueger family reunion in Phoenix, Arizona. I like to think about photographs as having this flexibility and believe they do by themselves – as demonstrated above and, of course, in those found in mass culture – but I am interested in pushing this a step further in my own practice in order to highlight that flexibility.

For the Mentor show, I approached the presentation of the photographs just as I approached the making of the photographs themselves.  Given the way I want to engage the viewer’s attention while looking at the images, it seemed almost antithetical to fix the prints in frames – the frame seems so final in relation to this work. Despite the several layers of mediation the photographs themselves present, the frame would impose a finality that, in my mind, would be reductive to my efforts in making the viewer a part of the photograph’s reading. By pinning them as loose prints to the sheet of wood that mimics a wall, I hoped to freely expose the prints to each other (since they vibe off one another) as well as to the viewer. 

The leaning of the wood wasn’t so much an afterthought as it was introduced by the fact that I bought wood that might have been a little too heavy to adhere to the wall with only four nails. I do feel, however, that my over confidence serendipitously added a nice layer to the presentation.  The leaning wood fully breaks away from the wall – a break that, in my mind, echoes the way in which the images break the passive gaze onto the images themselves.  This idea of breaking the gaze is pushed further by the fact that the prints are well below the conventional “viewing height”.  In a show with so much to look at, I like the idea of the prints being on the verge of escaping view yet retaining their own private presence.

The small grey prints, which hang just above the sheet of wood, represent the early stages of the trajectory into the color photographs pinned to the wood.  What separates them is the way in which they were made (via Risograph printer) and the fact they are purely about stripping away information, whereas the color prints are about building up information and subverting it – both methods, however, are meant to engage the viewer similarly.

ML: What has your most memorable moment been at SVA?
BK: Having my first meeting with Stephen Frailey and noticing the color of his office walls compliment his eyes very nicely.

ML: What are you going to be doing this summer and onwards?
BK: That’s the question, isn’t it! It’s probably that question alone that fosters productivity after graduation due to the neurosis it instills…or not. In all seriousness, I’m planning on staying here in New York for as long as I have productive things to do. I somehow weaseled my way into working with a former teacher of mine from SVA – which has proven to be a dream set-up. If I don’t bug her too much, I’ll hopefully help her out well into the summer, perhaps onwards. Other than that I’ll be working on things in the fall with LMAKprojects, a great gallery located in the Lower East Side.  Eventually I’m looking to go back to Graduate school – but have not thought about those specifics too deeply yet…

In any case, you can find me soaking up the California sun for the month of August.  I’ll be there for a party that my parents are having – in a strange way it is associated with my graduating but has more to do with mini burritos and margaritas.

Signe Pierce is 22 years old and is currently invading your reality.

MOSSLESS: How was your experience with your mentor was Janet Borden?
SIGNE PIERCE: Janet has been great to bounce ideas off of.  She provided a lot of insight into the thought process behind the Surreal Housewives.  I think some of my subject matter was a bit foreign to her (i.e., trashy pop culture and reality television… can’t say I blame her), however she was able to help me refine some of my ideas and helped me get closer towards what it really was that I was trying to accomplish with my work. Her critiques of my images and ideas prompted me to dig into myself. She had me asking questions and verbalizing ideas I had been having a hard time putting into words. She pushed me to make sure I was digging as deep as I possibly could. I still have some things I need to figure out… I think every artist always has their questions, but I really enjoyed my conversations and time with her.

ML: Can you tell me something about your work and how you chose to frame it?
SP: The pieces in the Mentor Show, Glitz Pageant and Surreal Housewives are from a series I’ve been working on called Role Modelz.  I’ve been musing the current onslaught of girly girl nastiness and decadence in pop culture, and how we’re viewing it within the context of “reality” TV.  The whole “reality” aspect is what really fucks with me intrinsically. I guess I just get angry about what gets perpetuated and sold as being “real”, when everything seems like artifIce. I worry about the effect it has on a younger, more impressionable person. I’m very interested in the ways that the “self-as-a-subject”, “anyone can be a star” culture is going to play out, and what it’s doing to social standards. I guess by using myself in my work, and specifically by playing multiple characters I feel like I’m sort of creating a paradigm of the disturbing standards being set. I like to take things to the extreme in my images as far as pop and color and “glitz” is concerned because I tend to feel like everything that surrounds this odd culture of femininity has this sort of lazy sparkle to it that loses its luster with every hair extension that gets sold.  I think that’s what drives me the most lately is that sex appeal, beauty, femininity, body parts, whatever, is what’s being sold to me, to us.  You’re selling me make up but the girl in the ad has digital skin… you’re talking about “reality” but everything I see is fake. I wanna be like “I DON’T CARE GO AWAY!!” because I know it’s all just artificial noise, but it’s so damn loud, so I guess I have to talk back.

All of that went into how I wanted to frame them. Specifically with Glitz Pageant, I knew I wanted her (Dannica-Lynn, superstar pageant princess) to be BIG and in your face.  I liked the idea of her looking out across the room, demanding you to stare into her vapid gaze, or “dead eyes” as I refer to them.  As far as my decision to bedazzle her frame (her frame is covered with various rhinestones and gems), it just made sense for the glitzy obsession and never-ending extravagant spectacle to be interfering with the piece in a physical way.  Everything about the culture is ostentatious so of COURSE Dannica-Lynn wouldn’t be seen without gems on her frame— she’d practically be naked! The Surreal Housewives didn’t get gems because there was already so much happening inside of the picture, plus all of their dresses were bedazzled to perfection by me and my friends (thx guys!), so they were dressed with a simple purple frame.  I wanted it to be loud, slightly annoying, and in your face so that you could get lost inside the freakish, sugary, bitch glitz environment. I’m going to stop now cuz I just said bitch glitz, which renders that answer over. 

ML: What was your most memorable moment at SVA?
SP: I had Jessica Craig-Martin as my junior year critique teacher and she is someone I’ll always cherish getting to know.  She took me as an assistant on a fashion shoot for Black Book magazine at a strip club in Manhattan. Hanging out in the strippers’ dressing room was an experience I’ll never forget.  Lots of make up, tooth brushes, sparkly panties, Gandhi quotes, gaudy jewelry, wigs, suspicious looking furniture, and high-ass-heels. One of my jobs was to run out and buy emergency chicken wings and crucifixes as props.  Jessica was great because she listened to my input and was receptive to my ideas.  She’s also just really, really funny.  When we would talk about our work and the ugly overconsumption of culture and material things and the sort of nausea it leaves one with she summed the mantra up perfectly with a sarcastic, “Give me bloated excess; give me diamonds!”.  I consider that to be a sort of philosophy of my characters for this series.

ML: What are you going to be doing in your upcoming years? 
SP: I’m definitely focusing on the humorous aspect that my work tends to have.  I feel like there’s nothing that speaks to me louder than good humor, and I like the idea of using it as a device to deliver information and headier ideas.  I’ve been exploring performance in my work for the past couple of years by playing these characters in my images and I’m starting to grow restless with the still photograph. I think the natural progression for me is taking the characters out of their silent still images and into actual reality.  I’ve spent so much time over-obsessing and dissecting the nature of “reality” and what it is to be real, and I think in order to really get what I want out of this I need to have my girls (and boys!) go into the real world.  I want to give them a voice and have them interact with real people and see what effect it can have. I am inspired to test the limits of subject matter, comfort levels, genre and humor. That’s what’s motivating me currently.  I’ll be doing something involving this at the Mentor Show, which you can watch here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/itz-bryssa-betch

(these questions were all asked just before the opening night. Hit ustream the link just above to see the performance Signe put on— I just had to ask an extra question about it)

ML: Can we talk about your performance at the show? I was the first person you ran into [in the video you can see me in the elevator] and even though I knew it was you I couldn’t recognize you, I wasn’t sure what to do.
SP: The performance was something I had been toying with for a while.  I knew I wanted to place my characters in an interactive setting, and having one debut at the mentor show just seemed like a challenge that made sense.  I knew that for this series the main representative would have to be a fame-hungry reality star, and thus, Bryssa was born.  Bryssa was basically a combination of every reality TV product I’ve ever observed— blonde, tan, extremely obnoxious.  However what sets her apart is that she films herself via her “reality stick”.  Basically I just attached my phone to a pink plastic pole and live streamed it to the internet to her show, “Itz Bryssa, Betch” so that everything she was doing could be viewed in real time.  She was walking around filming herself and making a spectacle of everything she was doing, which was essentially nothing.  She was there to represent Signe because “Sig couldn’t be there” and she just wanted to come out and support the arts for a night (the fact that she was featured in Surreal Housewives had NOTHING to do with it…) 

After a while she started to feel nauseous from all of the attention that was being payed to her and was downing slimey cocktails.  This led to her getting sick and puking all over Signe’s exhibit area.  By the end of it she had slipped in her own puke, lost her shoes, broken her cocktail glass, and somehow managed to cover the flowers Janet Borden gave her in slime.  She put the flowers below Dannica-Lynn’s picture as “a symbol of something.” (her words, not mine). I’m looking forward to editing the footage we filmed and turning it into a show.  This is just the beginning for Bryssa, she has so many exciting adventures to embark on with her Reality Stick (Bryssa Goes Clubbin’, Bryssa Goes To the Manhattan Mall on a Saturday, etc).  As far as reactions are concerned, you weren’t alone in not knowing what to do.  I think a lot of people didn’t know what to do with Bryssa other than to gawk, which was exactly the point.  She is there for you to consume and to be afraid of. You should be afraid!  

Derek Kalisher is 21 years old and is Romke’s boss.

MOSSLESS: Your mentor was Liz Deschenes. How was your experience with her?
DEREK KALISHER: What we talked about was fruitful, but it was somewhat brief. We only met once but we did exchange e-mails, throughout which we discussed the role of science and art.  This came to a head when she sent me a section of Robert Irwin’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. Sadly after that she had to make a trip to Germany, and we lost touch.  We only started talking again recently.

ML: Can you tell me something about the work you exhibited?
DK: I have a big fascination with life and death.  I’m sure we all do work around that concept. So, what I hoped to do with the work was photograph the in-between state, where the plant and animal both meet just as basic organic substance, with aspects of its former life, but clearly dead.

ML: What was your most memorable moment at SVA?
DK: I was asked to take part in SVA’s summer residency program.  I got to do it for free by assisting the coordinator as well as showing all the other students how to use all the equipment and being on call in case any of them had a problems. So, I thought it would be a good idea to set up shop in the radio station since I worked there during the year and had the keys for it. I’d hang there after class and if anyone needed any help I’d be at their service. So the weeks go on and things are going great, I had turned a section of the station into my own private studio; I was also in the early stages of working on the project being exhibited now. This was all until the elevator in our building breaks down and everyone needs to use the freight elevator, including the president of the school who’s office happens to be on the same floor as my “studio”. The timing couldn’t have been worse, that day I had chosen to shoot a dried fish I had picked up in Chinatown a day or two prior, and the odor had crept into the hall near the elevator.  I was just about to start shooting when I got a call to go help one of the other students on a different floor. While I was gone the president smelled something odd and investigated, to find the radio a wreck with all the stuff I was shooting, plus my friend Bobby hanging out there on the computer. I get a call saying I have 5 minutes to grab my stuff before the cleaning guy gets there and chucks most of the stuff in the radio. I scramble up stairs hiding all my equipment, photos, paper, and all my other things in the back room so they don’t get tossed. Only to have my key taken away soon after locking most of my things in the room. Luckily after pleading with the guard I get my stuff back but I’m banned from the radio for the rest of the summer. The best part is when I come back the following semester I get promoted to being the station’s manager.

ML: What are you going to be doing this summer and onwards?
DK: The summer I’m not sure. I hope to travel.  I’ve never really left New York for more then a week or two, and never out of the States. Beyond that I will most likely be looking for work, applying for this and that and inevitably a grad school.

 

Marissa Plant is 21 and wishes she could be best friends with Seth Green.

MOSSLESS: Your mentor was Susan Bright. How was your experience with her?
MARISSA PLANT: Susan Bright is an amazing person and I was really glad I had her as my mentor. She gave me great ideas to further my project and helped me narrow down which photographs to use in the show. She even helped me edit my artist statement and expand my ideas. She gave me a lot to think about such as how the public will view my photographs and how to title my images. 

ML: Can you tell me something about how you exhibited your work?
MP: I had a really hard time trying to figure out which photographs to use in the show.  I had first planned to use sixteen pictures but after seeing them up on the wall, I realized how overwhelming it was to have that many. Less was definitely more in this case.  I had Susan Bright as well as two other teachers at SVA look at my work to help me narrow down the selection and come up with an order.  The end result was nine images. I also played around with which color frames to use. At first I waned to use black, but with many suggestions to see what white looked liked, it ended up looking much better.

ML: What was your most memorable moment at SVA?
MP: My most memorable moment at SVA actually wasn’t really at SVA.  I took part of the SVA Shanghai summer residency program this past June.  It was three weeks of learning about the culture, arts and food.  I was able to go to many different museums as well as do some exploring on my own.  One of my favorite teachers at SVA, Abby Robinson, taught the class there and really made the experience come to life.  I had such a wonderful time photographing the city and meeting a lot of new amazing people. 

ML: Where do you see yourself in five years?
MP: This happens to be one question I’m really hating as of late, unfortunately that’s what you get for being senior! I really want to do something in films, particularly cinematography or shooting photographs on movie sets. I’ve always been a huge fan of the cinema and I really want to have job associated with movies. 

Tony Wilde is 23 years old and still loves pop punk.

MOSSLESS: Your mentor was Daniel Power. How was your experience with him?
TONY WILDE: My experience with Daniel was great. I was really glad Stephen Frailey didn’t pair me up with a photographer….I’ve gotten so sick of talking about photographs with other photographers. But yeah what can I say Daniel is really smart and knows what he is talking about, his feedback about my work was really interesting…it was something new and refreshing that I wasn’t getting at my critiques at SVA. He really brought some new ideas to the table about what Im doing with this work and where it can actually go. 

ML: Can you tell me something about this huge portrait you have up in the Mentor show?
TW: The photograph that is hanging in the mentor show is part of an ongoing series for over a year now, yet with no title. It involves history, in the way that I am making the model sit as he or she would have had to sit for a photograph back in the 19th century. A reverse of technology if you will? taking a state of the art camera and treating it as if it was a box camera with a pinhole lens. Im still trying to figure it all out. 

ML: What has your most memorable moment been at SVA?
TW: That would be May 12th 2011 when I graduate. 

ML: What are you going to be doing this summer and onwards?
TW: Hopefully getting a job at BOX Studios as a master printer for Pascal Dangin, moving into a loft, driving my VW, Surfing a lot, and working on new work, and enjoying life. 

Samantha Murasko is 21 years old and is burnt out on city life.

MOSSLESS: Your mentor was Mitch Epstein. How was your experience with him?
SAMANTHA MURASKO: It was pretty exciting. His work has been an influence on mine for years now and it was unbelievable luck that I got paired with him. We met and he looked over my prints and edited them down which was helpful. I can edit my own work for hours and not end up happy with it so it was interesting to see which images he chose. We talked about I wanted to say with this work and where it needs to go in the future. I left feeling resolved in a weird way which is what I guess is the whole point of the program.

ML: Can you tell me something about how you exhibited your work?
SM: I decided to present all vertical images in two rows of four prints each, eight prints in total. I don’t print very large so I thought it was was a good opportunity to show a small group from the work I’ve been making.  

ML: What has your most memorable moment been at SVA?
SM: Most memorable?  I’m not exactly sure, but I’ll never forget the moment I met Bobby Doherty. He was my first friend I made at college and we met in the dorm. He asked me if I wanted some of his life savers.

ML: What are you going to be doing this summer and onwards now that you’re done?
SM: I hate this question. Traveling is the only thing I’ve really thought seriously about lately if that’s any clue to what’s ahead, haha. Job hunting and sipping on Arnold Palmers? I think that’s a good answer.

Avi Katzman is 23 years old and is addicted to sudoku.

MOSSLESS: Your mentor was Elisabeth Biondi. How was your experience with her?
AVI KATZMAN: Honestly I was a little intimidated when walking into Ms. Biondi’s corner office in the New Yorker, but it was a rather pleasant experience. I only met with her once for about 20 minutes.  She was very straightforward about what worked and what didn’t with the photos I showed her. She commented that some of my pictures made her laugh and that it was very hard to make a successful funny image.  That was pretty cool. I don’t think I will have much of a relationship with her following the Mentor Show, but it was a once in a lifetime experience, nonetheless. 

ML: Can you tell me something about your work and how you exhibited it?
AK: I wanted to do something a little less traditional when exhibiting my work in the show. I decided to present the three photographs on a wooden shelf with brackets to get the feeling of finding them in a home. I think the shelf sort of tied all the images together as well.  My work primarily has been about playing and exploring the artist’s process.  Through literally playing with food and objects in natural light I have been exploring how the process of making things can be just as interesting as the final product.  As for the show, I wanted to show some of the more successful images I’ve created along the way.

ML: What has your most memorable moment been at SVA?
AK: Probably my most memorable moment at school was on my birthday in Marcia Lippman’s sophomore critique class.  She is known to be a tough teacher and this day she was particularly harsh.  I showed photographs that at the time I thought were good, but she sort of gave me ‘fresh perspective’ on them.  I took the criticism particularly harsh that day and I went to the bathroom and cried.  I will never forget crying in the bathroom on my birthday.  But I can say I am a much better photographer now because of those critiques.

ML: What are you going to be doing this summer and onwards?
AK: I’m not sure yet, but I know that I want to continue to create, in whatever way that means. I am willing to explore differnt creative opportunities. Right now I’m looking into working on a farm, teaching art to kids, and finding ways to travel and make work.  As long as I find an inspiring living space and working environment and continue to surround myself with creative people I will be happy.  We’ll see what happens…