ANDREW MEHALL



Statement Note: Andrew Mehall’s work for the MFA show is open-ended and uses sculpture and AI to make non-narrative video. He is interested in deconstruction and toying with authorship; Liz Heise-Glass wanted to mirror that practice with an analogous written reaction to it. She pulled text from various sources that she felt resonated with the project. While she didn’t go quite so far as to use AI to write the essay, she treated herself as an AI-generator by borrowing the words of others.
“According to the digital way of thinking, anything could be transformed into anything else and no one need worry about being cheated because this alchemy relied not on cunning sophistry, economic sleight of hand, or cultural bad faith, but on the bland, automated, everyday magic of numbers….The dream of the cloud was complete meltdown, such that everything became liquid….The aim of such a frictionless state was that anything, not only virtual but physical, might eventually be exchanged for absolutely anything else….In the material world the constant was entropy; here, the constant was metamorphosis.”[1]
— SETH PRICE


I don’t need to see,

I don’t see how you see out of your window,

I don’t need to see, I’ll paint mine black.[2]
— UGLY CASANOVA


“In fact, those who wish to entertain themselves are forced to engage with the new, by inventing new dimensions. One can see no end to it; this is the trap. 

“It is because of this that we have been obliged to recognize that a straight line curves in the universe, that the straight line could no longer move forward; it struck the interior face of the shell in which it was enclosed. Everyone then cried out: ‘It must be flexible; it must bend upon itself.’ And the straight line, thus becoming curved, evolved, turning and turning again, spiraling, inside the universe, the infinite, always returning to the same point. 

“Thus, although with no future, it evolved into this curved line, without power to escape the infinite. You understand what I mean?

“Finally, frankly, what absurdity it is for the true mind to see the rationality in admitting that a straight line is curved, even while asserting that it is straight. 

“You do understand, the more dimension, the more nothing, the more infinite, the more nothingness, the more divine, but, inconceivably, we refuse, foolish as we are, to see and contemplate it and to make use of it because it is too dazzling, because it burns reason.”[3]
— YVES KLEIN


[1] Seth Price, Fuck Seth Price: A Memoir (New York: Leopard, 2015), 109-110.

[2] Ugly Casanova, “Barnacles,” Sharpen Your Teeth, Sub Pop Records, 2002.

[3] Yves Klein, “II. Some (False Foundations, Principles, etc. and the Condemnation of Evolution,” from Yves Klein: Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein (New York: Spring Publications, 2007), 8. 

— Liz Rae Heise-Glass, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Candidate




EXHIBITION DOCUMENTATION BY SAM LO, OSU MFA PHOTOGRAPHY 2026