Out in the world with an MFA

What if Flash Gordon went to art school?

Bryan Schoneman Communicating with the B Horizon. 2010
Aluminum foil, dirt, Plexiglas, wood, glass, steel, rye grass, video
monitor
Dimensions variable
(Flash Gordon meets Kim Jones but manages to stay presentable.)

An exhibit is the last thing tuition buys you. Using as evidence the University of Washington’s MFA survey at the Henry Gallery, the program of digital arts and experimental media is worth the dough, as is sculpture, especially ceramic sculpture. Painting is less so. Although there are artists graduating who know how to move paint around, their modes range from bombast to nostalgia. Nobody appears to have spent any time in the church of what’s happening now. (Denzil Hurley is on the faculty, and yet there’s no sign these students had the benefit of his counsel.)

On the other hand, who knows? Some artists are sleepers who wake up later, while others who come on strong are never heard from again.

Below are a few of those I hope to hear from again.

If Alwyn
O’Brien stops making art, she’ll be missed. Starting with a lumpenproletariat material base familiar from the
abstractions of Franz West, she gives us the old world radiant in decorative
ruin. I can’t think of a UW graduate working in clay who has mattered this much since Michael Lucero in 1978. 

O’Brien, image via Best Of . Objects of Unknowing: Somewhere between the Propped and the Picturesque.
2010
Slip cast porcelain, photographic decals, foam core, plaster, paper,
wood, wheel, paint, wallpaper

(Images via All My Heroes Died of Syphilis)

When in doubt, build something. Samuel Payne‘s installation is a piece of high-flying overkill, a forensic examination of an ominous black smeary thing that remains hearty, despite a laboratory’s efforts to isolate it.

Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass). 2010
Sandbags, ax, jack stands, car scissor jacks, music stand, wood, light,
tape amplifier, speaker, cart, shoes, rope, hand-sewn sandbags from
clothes, canvas, paper, C.V. joint grease, tree stump, sound of chopping
wood

Hanita Schwartz took an object, did something to it, did something else to it.

Schwartz, Elsewhere under the Monochrome. 2010
Mixed media
Box: 64 x 42 x 40 in.
Print: 50 x 40 in.

Peter Nelson, still from Mr. and Mrs. Nelson. Oodles of charm here. Puppets with paper mâché heads and hands struggle through the issues of late middle-age confronting the artist’s parents. Killer text. I especially appreciate the stunned expression on the dad’s face. He thought everything was dandy but found out his wife has long contemplated an exit.

Nelson video here.

Lisa Rickey’s pillows look light as air, a la Warhol. They’re not. Kick one if you want to break your toe. Any way the Henry can buy these and leave them in the courtyard? That courtyard needs all the reflections it can get.

Rickey Pillow Talk (Reflection). 2010 stainless steel
Approximately 8-10 ft. x 10-12 ft. x 8-10 ft.
(Image via)
Lisa Rickey Pillow Talk (Reflection). 2010 stainless steel
Approximately 8-10 ft. x 10-12 ft. x 8-10 ft.
(Image via)

Maggie Carson Romano grew up in Arizona. (As the B-52s said about Idaho in 1980s, Get Out Of That State!) Using an experience she knows well, she charted the freckles that have appeared on her young body as sun damage and turned them into a sky. I love this piece, deeply and madly. (Sunblock, everybody, sunblock.)

Romano, Self-trace, for pressing against. 2010
Embossed photograph
44 x 90 in.

Romano:

 I see my freckles as an emergent physical record, mimicking
photographic film by darkening from exposure to sunlight. The map is
life scale showing the full space of my body while revealing only its
trace.
I embossed each freckle by hand, creating a relief map that can be read
by touching the surface of the image. The title, Self-trace, for
pressing against refers to my act of tracing my markings and also to the
freckles being a physical trace of my body. The title also invites the
notion of pressing against the surface of the map, suggesting that
another body could absorb my particular pattern of visual markings as
physical indentations on their own skin, amidst their own freckles.