In a university gallery, it may be impressive to exhibit famous pieces by prestigious artists, but when a gallery displays student work, it fits in with its environment, offering encouragement to the rest of the campus. Until April 22, the second exhibit of the ongoing MFA thesis series will be at the Tufts University Art Gallery in Aidekman Arts Center. Here a variety of mediums and styles come together in a show, as part of the joint degree program of Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA). Graduate students with different concepts, philosophies and techniques foster an unlikely, loose dialogue within the intimate space of the gallery.
A large painted wall at the front of the gallery reads "11," and includes artists Lucy Beecher, Scott Cartwright, Fran?§ois-Xavier DeCosterd, Emily Diehl, Thomas Doran, Kyna Jones, Sara Jones, Justin Life, Dawit Petros, Keith Sullivan and Benjamin Tiven. Incorporating so many artists under a single banner of a graduating class is a huge task. The transition between works can lead to some comparisons that are made simply because of the pieces' arrangement, so that once you have understood one artist, the task is to make a mental leap to the next theme.
At times the themes can be hard to grasp or too profound for the space given. There is a sense that these short thesis statements only allow viewers to puncture the surface of the endless intellectualizing that has gone into these final projects, so that the final paragraph is bursting with metaphors, symbolism and erudite concepts, summarized and cropped around the edges. These works cannot fit neatly into the bounds of a paragraph, but with student work, extensive discussion must be shortened, as with the amount of works on display in group shows like this one.
The exhibit opens with Sara Jones' work, which focuses on the implications of patterns for psychological welfare and as having some place in a home. She has documented the rooms of a house in Memphis, Tenn. in tiny oil paintings of interiors reminiscent of Bonnard. Jones has rendered her paintings figure-less, stark and bright, with an even light and smoothness of brush stroke that screams suburbia.
Often the wallpaper is quietly peeling back, rooms are falling apart and decomposing, so that a pristine dining room seems all the more collected compared to the center, where the shattered destruction of a fallen chandelier shocks the cleared table. Her concerns are patterns, precision and the way in which they relate to memory, an issue that she has manifested in the metaphor of wallpaper. These designs deconstruct organization on the way down, as the flowers in "Wilt" (2006) rot and die towards the floor, with the paint dripping, reflecting the decay of perfectionism, until the bottom is a jumbled heap of dead stems and petals.
Across the way, Keith Sullivan's work, though more cryptic, is a similar discussion of societal ills and subversive destruction. The juxtaposition of Jones' somewhat conservative paintings and Sullivan's video performance art tugs between the two for the viewer's attention within one room.
While her paintings deal with the construction of a house and its reflection of the lives that function within it, his piece involves the words of others, combined to form an "autobiographical narrative." Three screens, which rotate in a repeating loop, one of the artist reciting Allen Ginsberg's epic poem, "America," one playing air drums, and one of the artist stomping or jumping around, create a full experience of rhythm and proclamations.
Lucy Beecher's work ties almost directly into these two artists, as she deals with the concept of the name, and how we own and disown our labels. She has painted a series of women on one panel, all named Lucy, facing forward, and rendered with a naturalistic hand. The work itself is captivating and confrontational, but requires the artist statement to gain a certain depth.
Alternatively, Justin Life's work is one of the few in the show that stands entirely on its own, being indicative of the philosophical explanation rather than the other way around, so that standing before his massive black and white mural of amorphous shapes, sweeping lines, tiny fragmented details, and bursting body parts is an all-encompassing experience.
With shows like this, there is a tendency to look for trends, and though there is a distinct diversity of materials and styles, it seems that the majority of these artists have moved towards realism and a documentation of life as a conglomeration of experiences and influences, a layered psychological questioning and unquestioning, and eventual decay. It is difficult to neatly tie together 11 different artistic voices, especially when they reside in an educational framework, so that walking through the gallery, we feel a sense of potential, but we only get a whiff of the whole idea.
