“It was the Fish that Saved Us,” a 2025 nonfiction short film by Shruti Rao, an MFA documentary film student at SIU Carbondale, will be one of the offerings highlighted Friday, Jan. 31, at the Saint Louis Art Museum. (Still photo provided)
January 28, 2025
SIU Carbondale MFA students to present work at Saint Louis Art Museum Jan. 31
CARBONDALE, Ill. — Nine Southern Illinois University Carbondale Master of Fine Arts students will present a curated program of creative research at the Saint Louis Art Museum on Friday, Jan. 31.
“Translations: Creative Research in the Media Arts” is from 5-7 p.m. in Farrell Auditorium, One Fine Arts Drive, as part of the museum’s Free Fridays programming. The program will feature diverse work offering film, sound, performance, photographs, and drawn and print media, all contextualized by the artists themselves, said Kevin Mercer, an assistant professor of digital arts and media in SIU Carbondale’s School of Media Arts.
“This is such a rare and valuable opportunity for our students to share their work at an internationally renowned institution,” he said.
Mercer said the museum selected the students’ program after a meeting with program coordinator MaryClaire Pavlick, where he highlighted “the high-quality research underway in our MFA program.”
“Through collaboration, the students arrived at the theme of translation,” Mercer said. “Individual and collective inquiry into their functions as media artists brought about manifold interpretations of translation: language and communication, storytelling, the mutability of signals, bodies in space moving among various positions, the occupation of physical and digital realities, experiences shared across generations. To translate is to elucidate, to manipulate and to move. Through these research presentations, the artists will share their always-timely endeavors to convey lived experiences through artistic practice.”
The program was conceptualized and executed as part of Mercer’s class, Studio Art Practice and Critique in the fall 2024 semester. This work is continuing this semester in a course led by Heather O’Brien-Takahashi, an assistant professor in cinema and interdisciplinary media in the School of Media Arts,
Students whose works will be presented are:
- Jordan Bardgett, experimental film, Fort Thomas, Kentucky.
- Diazha Berry, drawing and collage, Marion, Illinois.
- Skyler Foy, performance art, Raleigh, North Carolina.
- Kendra Keefer-McGee, performance art and experimental film, Carbondale.
- Ashish Kumar, documentary film, Hyderabad, Telangana, India.
- Drew McGinniss, experimental, interactive film, Greensboro, North Carolina.
- Saba Raissian, performance art, Tehran, Iran.
- Shruti Rao, documentary film, Bangalore, Karnataka, India.
- Drew Yepsen, documentary film, Peoria, Illinois.
More information on SIU Carbondale’s School of Media Arts is available at 618-536-7555 or mediaarts@siu.edu.