Review
8 CONVERSATIONS
University of Calgary MFA Exhibition
Runs until September 11
Nickle Arts Museum (U of C)
A remarkably strong group of graduates are exhibiting their work at the Nickle Arts Museum this month for the University of Calgary’s annual Master of Fine Arts graduating thesis exhibition – entitled 8 Conversations. Featured artists include Benjamin Evans, Erin Finley, Joan Kendrick, M.N. Hutchinson, Hye Seung Jung, Iwona Sarnecka-Dabrowa, Matt Walker and Stacey Watson.
The show weaves itself through the space. Works criss-cross. These are artists who have worked closely beside one another for two years. The exhibition is a series of ongoing conversations, as its title suggests.
Evan’s sprawling Am I an Encyclopedia is an art history decoupage freak-out charted out between carefully laid lines of string. Pages cut from an encyclopedia, systematically placed on the wall, have been altered by Evans and collaborators for a pastiche of medical diagrams, Dada word experiments and some Basquiat-style blow-ups. This massive and cunning wall piece is more than immersing – it’s engulfing, like a two-storey iceberg that speaks your name. Its coup de grâce is a raindrop-spewing rain cloud and pirate ship diorama.
Project – House by Hye Seung Jung offers smart, suspended fishing-line weights that sparkle, and popping, crisp houses hanging from jam-packed balloons. The work is concise, economical.
Peppering the exhibition are Walker’s sculptures. A few among them: hollowed, fabricated stones, a bent sheet of wood veneer dedicated to Richard Serra and Nothingness, and a conglomeration of tree trunks and other bits that have been gnawed, jammed and forced together into a tortured jungle gym. Walker’s cautious sensitivity towards his constructions is impressive – each work replies to a particular quality of its material with a simple answer that might be called poetic.
Sarnecka-Dabrowa’s extensive showing of paintings and drawn works reveal significant control and an understanding of media. In them, figures are bound, contained – sometimes simply posed. Each holds ambiguity. The feel of sinew, bone and skin is all here. A good sense for substance, form and the touch of flesh makes these carefully constituted works.
Reserve a good chunk of time to examine Hutchinson’s platform laboratory – a glittering, packed affair. Too complex to summarize, It’s alright, everything will be OK is a click-and-cut wood-frame hut of experiments, a performance gym for a very active imagination that might well bellow an exuberant "YES!" Look for a re-jigged record player, speakers made from plastic drinking cups, a pulley system bound for uncertain uses (flying machine?) and the artist’s head glowing like a full moon on a monitor.
Toronto artist Finley’s Nadia Nefariously is the Iron Maiden T-shirt of painting. Stitched, sequined and calligraphy-covered surfaces contain a mix of binder art, soft-porn imagery and lucid texts. Not to be trifled with. Glitter attacks and feather-fun fur traipses abound.
Interface, Kendrick’s contribution, has charming optics to it and clean forms. A vista of objects viewed from one point assemble into a formalist, flat image. It’s a spatial riddle that works. Inside a dark partition is where the real goods are: a dark pool that reflects – wait – a pin-prick constellation from the ceiling. A set of deconstructed climbing rungs forest the space. Chilling. Tack-sharp.
Like some elementary-school operetta set, Watson’s installed sculptures and hey-wow apparatuses contain parts that Margot Tenenbaum might have used for her first stage production: prints, photographs, drawings and objects – including a science-fair grotto – as well as a hilarious and spectral video featuring mysterious, sometimes masked characters: wanderers, outcasts, escapees and clouds. A Promethean fountain spurts a wall-smear of grey paint. Watson’s puzzling and smooth vignettes are nostalgic gems that insist on ruling their own peculiar world.
Art literati, armchair enthusiasts and the uninitiated will find evidence in surplus at the Nickle: hot art, here, now. |
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