Eleanor Heartney

2011-2012 MFA Critic in Residence

The title of this show refers to a maxim of indeterminate authorship that reads in full: a camel is a horse designed by committee. An MFA show is, like a camel, an entity that is at once perfectly functional and inherently awkward. It reflects the individual trajectories of the artists whose work it represents. But it is also possible to read the ghost of a group dynamic in any MFA show as these are individuals who have been working, living and evolving in close proximity for two years as they have pursued their MFA degrees. These two readings are in potential conflict, which is best resolved by considering the show to be a whole made up of fully independent parts.

As the 2011/12 Visiting Critic, I have been privileged to work with these eleven young artists over the last year. It has been a rewarding experience. My admiration and respect have grown as I have watched their struggles to locate themselves within a contemporary art world of almost unprecedented diversity. Their work reflects the multiplicity of approaches and ideas evident in artists across the globe. And this should not be surprising, because these MFA graduates come from diverse backgrounds and bring to bear very different personal histories and intellectual concerns. They address issues that range from the personal to the political to the philosophical, taking up everything from ecological threat and the shifting paradigms of science, to family dynamics and the search for existential meaning.

One striking aspect of the work of this group of inveterate explorers is its hybridity. Many of the works here exist between conventional categories. For instance, Kristen Sweeney employs photography and installation in works that use her own complicated familial interrelationships as a springboard for an examination of the role played by family in the creation of a sense of self. Miranda Maher expands the craft tradition with jewelry that pulls ornamentation into the realm of the grotesque, in the process erasing the distinction between viewer and participant. Christopher Luongo employs video, performance and installation to interrogate the way that new technologies have altered our sense of space and time while turning watchers into watched.

Other artists create environments that challenge our visual perceptions. Kristen Brandoff invites the viewer to focus on otherwise fleeting experiences by transforming quotidian spaces through small alterations, additions and optical illusions. Klimentina Jualeska performs a similar operation on ordinary objects like chairs, glasses and books, using light and the form distorting qualities of Fresnel television screens to both dematerialize and reinvent the world we think we know.

Michelle Orsi Gordon and Caleb Prewitt are both interested in the construction of knowledge through science. Orsi Gordon examines the parallels between the interior landscape of the mind, the microscopic architecture of cells and membranes and the expansive structure of the cosmos. Prewitt mines the history of science to create fictive narratives that suggest that paradox and contradiction are the stuff out of which our future will be constructed.

This year’s class also contains four painters, but again the diversity of their approaches is striking. Alyssa Fanning’s paintings and drawings are inspired by real life scenarios of environmental destruction and natural disaster. Here she presents small, near abstract drawings that express a sense of a universe in a constant state of flux. Samantha Fricano harkens back to the beloved objects of childhood in Pop inflected paintings that transform images of plastic toys through cropping and scale changes in order to suggest their unsettling role in the formation of adult desires, fantasies and dreams. David Oquendo draws on preexisting images drawn from a variety of sources to build a personal mythology that he presents in the form of large, temporary wall paintings. And finally Ashli Sisk mines the tradition of baroque and renaissance representation to present poignant portraits of species whose existence is threatened by our human-centric credo.

A horse designed by committee indeed. Congrats to these newly minted MFAs as they leap with their steed into the world beyond.

Eleanor Heartney