MFA provides financial fodder for starving artists

In 1891, French painter Paul Gauguin, destitute and in debt, left his wife and five children in poverty to flee to the tropical paradise of Tahiti, where, by all accounts, he had copious amounts of sex with the beautiful native women there while producing some of his greatest artwork.

In light of Gauguin's extended vacation, the Museum School's Traveling Scholarship Program offers a less dubious alternative to burgeoning artists looking to find inspiration abroad. The scholarship, which can be worth anywhere from $80,000 to $100,000 before being split amongst the winners, not only goes far in covering travel expenses but also gives its recipients the distinct honor of having their award-winning work displayed a gallery away from Gauguin's in the MFA.

Besides their artwork's physical proximity to each other, the 2003 Traveling Scholars have little in common save for a degree from the Museum School: four of the winners were once Tufts students in the dual degree program with the Museum School, while other winners received a fifth-year certificate from the art school.

The works of the 2003 Traveling Scholars range from traditional-minded paintings and photographs to multimedia pieces that demand engagement from the audience.

In this latter category is Maria Vasconcelos' "Quag." A commentary on "contemporary culture's obsession with beauty, pleasure, and excess consumption," "Quag" is a foot long sheet of toxic-colored plastic that drips off its pedestal onto the clean museum floor, forcing wary onlookers to tip-toe around the sculpture less they lose a foot in its fluorescent muck.

Perhaps the exhibition's most ambitious piece is Mary Oestereicher Hamill's "regarddisregard." Hamill gave camcorders to homeless Bostonians and allowed them to film their world for a day. Hamill then hung the resulting rolls of film from the ceiling of her gallery space to form a prison-cell of celluloid bars. When visitors enter the cell to see what the homeless men and women have filmed, a surveillance camera broadcasts their image to a television screen on a public street frequented by the homeless.

Other pieces aren't as complicated as Hamill's but are just as interesting. Riyo Hirota used her metalworking experience to create eerie, lifelike creatures out of metal plates that look as if they are about to jump to life and claw out the visitor's eyes.

Speaking of ocular damage, Esperanza Mayobre's "Cleansing Vision" is a honeycomb structure filled with what look to be deflated eyeballs. Hidden on the back of one of the sculpture's cells is a small epitaph explaining the work: "Her eye began to grow and grow until it fell down. The doctor said oxycontin for the pain. Then I asked, what can I have for my soul? After a couple days the other eye fell down but there was no more money for the drugs."

Heidi M Marston's photographs aren't nearly as grave as Maybore's piece. They instead are clever, quirky explorations into her place in the world. One, "Desires, Pre-Packaged" is a photograph of a model of the gallery where the artist's work is displayed, complete with miniature recreations of the other photographs on display and a toy soldier stand-in for the viewer.

Boru O'Brien O'Connell's photographs are equally idiosyncratic. One, "Self-Portrait with Family", takes the theme of the family portrait and turns it inside-out with a particularly un-happy looking family and an uncanny floral pattern.

There is also something equally out of place but hard to pin down about Jaya Howley's paintings. The paintings themselves look to be right out of a children's book with their depiction of nature in flat colors and thick brushstrokes. But Howley's version of nature belongs to a child's fantasy as well; in one, a mountain lifts on a hinge to reveal a village hidden underneath and in another, a tunnel of dirt snakes through the otherwise normal wilderness.

David Palmer's heady swirls of thick blue paint are the exhibition's most abstract work. The paintings, all named after women, stand at the other end of the spectrum from Benjamin Draper's work: finely wrought portraits of blank-faced friends and acquaintances in the tradition of Edgar Degas and Gerhard Richter.

Somewhere between Palmer's formless swirls and Draper's detailed technique, lies the work of Eirene Efstathiou and Chung Shil Adams. Efstathiou creates Polaroid-sized paintings that recall an out of focus filmstrip, while Adams combines hazy pencil sketches with fuller, more realized paints.

The works of the 2003 Traveling Scholars will be on display until March 14, when presumably they will have long ago left the country to find their own Tahiti.