Graduating Seniors Show Their Stuff
Click here for BFA ArtworkAbout the BFA show -- I'm kind of a square and I didn't go to the opening reception. I rarely do. At receptions I can never concentrate on the art, and it's not just the distraction of free crab cakes and champagne. I have slight claustrophobic tendencies, not to mention the fact that I'm fairly short, which are the same reasons I rarely go to concerts. So I spent a lazy weekday afternoon there, and I missed the hullabaloo that inevitably ensued while the artists were present.
That said, another disclaimer: The sheer volume of art, representing the work of 268 SAIC bachelor's candidates, prohibits a discussion of all of it -- even all of the best. Because the show isn't categorized according to students' concentrations, and because SAIC students may concentrate in a given medium but don't declare a major or necessarily exhibit what they've focused on during their art-school career, it's even more difficult to assess the BFA exhibition in the same ways I usually look at art shows. The mission of the annual show at Gallery 2 seems to let each student's work -- the work they specifically chose to exhibit -- speak for itself. The only way to review this exhibition at all is to respond to individual works on their own terms. And though initially I wasn't interested in finding cohesive themes in the show -- I figured such an exercise would be futile -- upon reflection, some did emerge, and they're conceptual themes rather than styles or movements of any kind.
One of the first things I noticed (after Lisa Hensley's photo booth, of course) was Scott Lyne's "O + C 4-Ever," a miniature sculpture of a tree carved with a heart and the aforementioned initials. Planted firmly on a highly polished circular base, it almost appeared to be a collectible figurine or trophy, yet the mucky moss around its roots and the dingy plastic bags caught in its branches belied any preciousness. Lyne's exquisite, odd work reminded me that one's personal history disintegrates with time, and always seems rosier than it really was. This experience set the tone for what I noticed again and again: a significant amount of work spoke in the language of nostalgia -- using imagery, materials, and concepts from childhood or simpler times. Sometimes the result was kitsch, either intentional or not, and occasionally seemed stale, because culturally we're swimming in a veritable sea of kitsch.
Artists who made it work included Christopher Jackson, whose digital lenticular print -- similar to holography -- captured a dreamy image of young man sleeping peacefully on vintage E.T: The Extraterrestrial-print sheets. Jackson's subject wears Eliot's red hooded sweatshirt, but when viewed from another angle, he's bare-chested. The image shares a vernacular with holy cards and gag gifts, yet seems magical in this context. Similarly, an oil-on-canvas triptych by Allison Abell, "Rita, 1977," a portrait of a placid church lady flanked by windows, somehow resonated beyond its kitschy surface, looking more mysterious than corny.
Though kitsch was king, another form of nostalgia surfaced: work that dealt with something more ephemeral: memory itself. In Danielle Nelson's "Holding Together Memory," photographic source material is reduced to silhouettes -- the kind you pay too much for at theme parks or street fairs -- and the blank space is replaced with woven material made out of old clothing. Lynne Clarey's installation included stained, discarded, and destroyed mattresses and coils as well as photographs of the coils' imprints on human flesh. In a show without much overt sexual content, Clarey's tattered remnants of a bed evoked eroticism and pain, managing to be both repulsive and sexy. Ruth Reyna's oil paintings, which captured the subtleties of Latin dance, are framed as snapshots -- of the way dancers' torsos twist and turn, of the folds of fabric on a dress as it moves around the dancer's body, functioning like flashes of memory. Josh Darr's painting "Untitled (What Are You Looking At?)," similarly depicted an awkward moment between strangers -- the instant when casual eye contact becomes disconcerting. The unnerving composition -- the figures in the foreground have their backs to the viewer -- was amplified by their placement in a subway station, ruffled by a rush of train-wind.
I would have been disappointed if there weren't works addressing capitalistic greed and consumerist culture, and I needn't have worried -- this is art school, after all. Elizabeth Albright's "Personal Soap," a collection of miniature hotel soaps personalized with the names of her fellow BFA candidates, was a play on the phony elitist cache of monogramming. It could be argued that Devin W. Bercaw's "Fuck Gender," a collection of wrenches wrapped in pink thread and encased in black satin-lined frames, was a playful examination of the gender-specific marketing of consumer products.
Some artists sold their work in a makeshift boutique/installation space. Two of the most highly anticipated "boutiques" were by Sue Fox and Karin Patzke, who both plastered campus walls with enigmatic, eye-catching posters, creating pre-exhibition hype. Sue Fox, who in her artist statement describes herself as "an almost obsessive-compulsive consumer," turned the tables and sold merchandise, including perfume and clothes � la J. Lo, bearing her name and likeness. Patzke's "The Life," a complete line of clothes, toys and coloring books, skewed the cutesy Sanrio aesthetic with cartoon animals who pack guns and tip forties. "All your needs," her tagline proclaimed -- a cheeky nod to "lifestyle" marketing. What was missing in Patzke's and Fox's work was the slickness we normally see in branded merchandise, and they missed themark if that was their intention. Their products seemed to be celebrations of D.I.Y. culture rather than fully realized parodies of marketing strategies.
A few fashion students sold their designs on garment racks without a hint of irony, including Esther Myong Chung's collection of women's and men's knitwear, made from manipulated suiting. Her tubular, nubby wool garments were like soft cocoons for retreating into urban melancholy. Expanding the field of wearable art objects, Malika Green's untitled trio of leather, metal, and bone footwear, especially one pair of pointy-toed heels whose upper mimicked a human spine, had a creepy, cartoonish, yet organic quality, as if David Cronenberg designed new shoes for the Wicked Witch of the West.
Meanwhile, all of this shopping was making me hungry. Meredith Myles presented an olfactory delight and redefined the notion of "eye candy" with her installation "Are You Satisfied?" in which larger-than-life donuts lay temptingly on gigantic doilies, and rows of cinnamon rolls line candy-pink walls, suffused with an artificial baked-goods scent. Danielle Leigh Clements' "Nutrition Facts," a vertical wall hanging of woven polypropylene, yarn, and food packaging, simultaneously recalled folk art rugs and Pop Art's appropriation of commercial design.
Just as critiques and celebrations of capitalism were de rigeur, so was political, specifically anti-war, work. Curtis Oliveira's work certainly spoke the loudest. He propped up picket signs, posted statements from various war protesters arrested at last month's skirmish on Lake Shore Drive, and scrawled "This is what democracy looks like -- Demon-strate your rights = Go to jail" in spray-paint across his wall.
Some of the most memorable work was simply uncategorizable. Min's work included a forlorn red mitten attached to the wall, a black-and-white line painting of two figures, one poking the other's stomach, and a slick little painting of an alligator with a bare light bulb hanging in front of it. Lucy Wieczorek created a sculptural environment I could only comprehend as a kind of chrysalis for nerd chic, with "Fred," an eight-foot sculptural hive lined with etchings of horn-rimmed glasses. Ben Syverson's fantasy/gamer-inspired photographs, complete with inscrutable captions ("I Am the Emissary. You Are the Medium," were cheesy and bizarre yet unassailably cool, kind of like David Bowie in the '80s.
More random observations: Eric Mirabito's "Fixtures," wheel-thrown stoneware fashioned into toilet-like-forms, yet apparently devoid of function, sat on rough wood packing crates. But the industrial quality of these "Fixtures" was coolly problematized by their adornment with the epitome of decoration -- blue china-pattern flowers. Nicole Melanie Davis' cast bronze and steel sculptures of black women with exaggerated, bulbous posteriors, juxtaposed with found dolls half-submerged in yellow liquid, were lovely and strange, though I couldn't figure out whether they were a celebration or indictment of our booty-obsessed culture. Hiroshi McDonald Mori's two-channel video installation was, on one channel, a serene meditation on the slow unraveling of some kind of red knitwear against a white tile bathroom floor, and on the other, a distorted, undulating, disembodied sanguine blob. Projected in a spotless alcove lined with plush white carpet, Mori's stylish presentation accentuated his scrupulously composed images.
And there were works whose success lay in simply the kinds of qualities that seem a little out-of-style: craftsmanship, simplicity, and communication of universal emotions. One such success was Grace H. Park's "Struggle," a collection of ink-pen line drawings coupled with scrolls of text that spilled onto the floor, witnessed her grandmother's battle with osteoporosis, and its crippling effect on them both. The delicacy of Park's exquisite drawings and her tiny, precise handwriting was tonic in an exhibition that sometimes felt specious and chaotic. It was in front of her drawings that I experienced what I seldom do when I look at art: instead of being shocked, dismayed, or confused, laughing, or internally searching for the cultural reference/inside joke, I was genuinely touched. I warned you I was a square.
Photography by Janine Nock