angela berry
class of 2017
about
Angela Berry is a dual-degree graduate candidate at the California College of the Arts pursuing an MFA/MA in Visual and Critical Studies (2017). She earned her BA in Fine Art from Sewanee: The University of the South, graduating with honors in 2008. From 2008-2014 Angela worked actively in the New Orleans contemporary arts community as the Visual Arts Coordinator at the Contemporary Arts Center, organizing team member of the 2013 Hand-In-Glove Conference for alternative arts organizations, and as a collective member of the artist co-operative The Front (2012 – present), founded in 2008 amidst the resurgence of grassroots organizing in post-Katrina New Orleans. She is the 2014/2015 and 2015/2016 recipient of The Bernard Osher Foundation Scholarship at CCA.
Angela’s work explores the varying degrees of drama between land use and development—in an attempt to elevate the histories of both individual and collective choices—leading to the displacement of materials from their intended use or environment. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions nationally and most recently internationally in Tokyo, Japan at Ginza Art Lab. Her 2013 solo exhibition left out—which paired photographs of discarded items in the New Orleans landscape with 3D printed prototypes of the man-made detritus—was reviewed in the 2013 June/July issue of Art in America.
angela’s thesis
W(H)ETTING THE WORD
Roni Horn’s Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), 1999, presents a suite of fifteen offset lithographs to which are appended a recursive system of six hundred footnotes, each referencing water. For Horn watching water creates a “vertigo of meaning.” I consider this vertigo in the pairing of footnotes to image, turning water (noun) into water (verb) in a w(h)etting of the word. Like the sharpening of a knife against a stone, each footnote whets the view, forcing the viewer to oscillate between reading and looking; to become a performer in an uncertain visual field. “37Is it moonlight or mercury?”