Inviting visitors into their lives, welcoming them into their bedrooms, family slide shows, towns, alter egos, life stories, and even into their bodies, the last of four MFA Thesis Exhibitions presented at the Tufts University Art Gallery combines six artists and soon-to-be joint degree program grads who share a common theme in their art.
In a show that could easily be divided into six separate mini-exhibits, this group of theses makes a coherent whole. The artists all grapple with the meaning of identity and its implications in their art. Exploring this theme through a variety of media, every piece relates to the artists' own personal histories and reaches beyond the confines of privacy into larger, conceptual meanings.
Some of the pieces are infused with personal history and deal explicitly with the transience of memory and time and the way that art attempts to capture this. Upon entering the Gallery, visitors are greeted with the familiar clicking sound of a slide projector in senior Danielle M. Avram's "Improved Earth." The series of photographs projected on the wall are not so recognizable, however, as they display the lives of a family of strangers.
On the opposite wall another image is projected: a film of the Saskatchewan prairies in Canada where the artist grew up. In trying to capture the image of a never-ending landscape, Avram has confined her perspective to the unmoving screen of the film. Only the sound of muffled wind emanating from two speakers surpasses these limitations, reverberating through the room and beyond it.
Even as you leave the work, the mechanical click of the slide show and howling wind follow you with a rhythm that reaffirms the piece's construction and production. As a voyeur in this family slide show, the viewer discovers the trichotomy of the prairie that catches Avram's interest, the nature of simultaneous fullness and estrangement in an open landscape, and the voyeuristic view of a stranger's unexplained memories.
Avram's piece sets up the show perfectly, and as we play with these images, making them our own and ultimately feeling separated from them, we see senior Tricia Neumyer's work, fittingly entitled, "Play With Me." Her art is overtly made in the image of herself, and she welcomes the viewer to physically manipulate her identity, creating paper dolls with different outfits and pop-up picture books of relationships, making somewhat uncomfortable implications as to the control the viewer has over the artist and the invasive consequences of art's creation for Neumyer.
In fact, Neumyer writes in her statement, "It is my assertion that truth lies in the viewer - you are invited to seek it out, find your own place within it, and try to figure out where mine is."
Conversely, senior Jennifer J. Woodward's piece, "Haven," explicitly represents the artist's "place," as she has built a surrealist installation depicting her own childhood bedroom. Woodward herself is there in a kind of performance art, wrapping herself in long, fake hair, nearly suffocating herself in it, transforming the television screen on which she is broadcasted into the private mirror of a girl's childhood. She incorporates secret symbolism in every piece of furniture, reinventing the privacy of all bedrooms in which only its inhabitants can know their values.
Senior Divya Murthy similarly brings the viewer to her home, but her piece adds a political level of identity, commenting on what it means to be an American and the "notion of the real" in documentary. Murthy uses a large format camera and digitally combines the images, resulting in an acutely detailed final image that is virtually infallible and makes viewers wish Murthy could have depicted Avram's prairies.
Echoing through the show is the music from "Tony Trouble's Hipwact Sock Hop," senior artist Tony Carneiro's installation presenting the apartment of his invented pop icon Tony Trouble, Carneiro's alter ego of sorts. Upon entering the rooms, a sign that reads, "Please leave your troubles with your shoes at the door thank you" introduces the scene within: a glittery, carefree and dizzying environment of imagery from the 1950s and 1960s. The identity Carneiro creates here is false, as Tony Trouble's biography is entirely fictional. And Carneiro's exploration of our reaction to it relates closely to the disconnect present in his fellow artists' work.
Lastly, senior Christopher Sanderson's statement for his thesis project, "With One Eye Closed," reads like a short memoir describing a traumatic childhood experience. Yet not all of his smooth, perfected, acrylic, comic-book-style paintings seem to refer to this specific memory, or if they do, it is not made clear. Regardless, these paintings pop off of the wall with their bright colors and raised surfaces, despite the unmistakable flatness of his uniform, calculated painting style.
These artists have connected themselves to their art; the subjects are their own personal life histories and thereby implore the viewer to explore the need, or the capacity, for relating to strangers through art, through representations of stories and chronicles of identity.
