MFA Candidate Spotlight: Ally Christmas

Ally Christmas, Metadreaming, 2018

The Georgia Museum of Art will soon host the annual Master of Fine Arts Degree Candidates exit show. The exhibition will display the creative works of 16 students slated to graduate from the Lamar Dodd School of the Art in May. This week, we continue to spotlight a few of these unique artists with information on Ally Christmas.

Christmas hails from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where her artistic journey began during high school. She went on to study analog photography during her undergraduate years at the University of Virginia. After graduation, Christmas spent the following year working on her own pieces and mentoring other students.

She found herself intrigued by the University of Georgia’s interdisciplinary master of fine arts program and soon took the plunge into the American South. “The southern culture here is just so much more welcoming,” she says of her experience in Athens, a place she has come to be inspired by and love.

Christmas’ choices of medium and style have continued to evolve in this open environment. Analog photography has given way to video and digital imagery, which she is excited to present at the MFA exit show. Christmas’ contributions to the show will be a central video piece accompanied by digitally created imagery. Through these works, she conveys “the return of the ‘real’ through the glitches or errors in a work of art.”

Christmas hopes viewers will find themselves in the digital sphere through her work. The layers crossed to enter this mindset, she says, will cause the audience to consider what connects them to the world within the screen.

Whether these layers are of the self, multiple selves or both is a question Christmas has explored throughout her MFA. Her video and digital imagery pieces will lead the audience deep within her question and, perhaps, to its answer. The question may be personal, but it will easily inspire the viewer to wander a similar path.

To see Christmas’ work, along with that of all the other MFA candidates, you can visit the exit show, on view April 7 – May 20, 2018.

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Savannah Guenthner

Intern, Department of Communications