Prodigal Summer: MICA MFA Candidates from the Summer Program

G-Spot Audio/Visual Playground

July 1 – 30

Opening Reception Saturday July 9, 8 – 11 pm.

By Cara Ober

When I began the Summer MFA program at MICA four years ago, I learned a tough lesson: the world doesn’t stop for artists to create their work. Despite an intense summer schedule of full of visiting artists, group critiques, and studio time, at the end of my “prodigal” summer, I was spent. Lost in the real world, my studio time was quickly gobbled up: paying the bills, checking the email, and waiting in lines at the DMV, like any other civilian. It didn’t take long to realize that I would need to restructure my time around the paintings I was longing to create, scooping out chunks of time whenever possible, no matter how small, if I was planning to succeed.

The beauty of the Summer MFA program at MICA is that it forces its students to balance the responsibilities of a busy life with a rich and rewarding studio practice. When I went back to my job teaching high school, I decided to make the most of my next three years as an ‘independent’ graduate student. Whether it was painting in the evening in my studio, or doodling at my job, or going to art openings, all of it went towards a purpose: earning a degree, but more importantly, my own artistic growth.

MICA’s little known Summer MFA program was the first to create a flexible and innovative program, a trend which is sweeping through the country’s art colleges, with many copycat programs developing. It makes sense: not only can graduates finish school without quitting jobs and accruing crippling debts, students have three years to develop a body of work for a thesis show. These three years of devotion to a studio practice are motivated by several slide reviews per year, and a marathon weekend of critiques every January.

The work in this exhibit, “Prodigal Summer,” offers a chance to see an amazing range of work produced when an artist is focused on making art, even without a perfect schedule or environment. All fourteen MFA candidates in this show are finishing up their fourth summer at MICA, ready to graduate and move on to new accomplishments. The good news is they already know how to function as professional artists out in the real world, even without graduate school to motivate them.

Essay by Kristen Hileman on MICA Summer MFA 2005 Graduates

It feels forced to search for too many commonalities in a grouping of artworks that reflects not a response to a single theme or the selection of a curator looking to make an aesthetic or conceptual point, but rather the end result of a multi-year process for fourteen individual artists who have now earned their MFAs from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Rather than try to explain away the individual journeys these artists have taken by emphasizing how they are alike, I offer brief descriptions of their impressive work. Affinities between the works naturally arise, however, and have helped organize this overview.

Sherry J. Insley aims her camera at reflective antique light-switch plates, capturing softly distorted domestic moments in an inconspicuous feature of many Baltimore homes. Initially the act of looking at these images is pleasurable and unthinkingly voyeuristic, the play of the camera lens and the mirrored surface of the quaint household fixture deflects the possibility of a confrontational encounter between viewer and viewed. But as the ambiguity of many of the emotions and interpersonal exchanges pictured surfaces, the mood of the photographs grows more anxious and lonely. This uneasiness is heightened when the light-switch asserts itself as a dark blur hovering over the scene or partially obscuring the figures. As this spectral layering becomes more apparent, the attractive bodies and vibrant, comfortable interiors dissolve into nostalgic traces of daily incidents past.

In Lillian Phipps Johnston’s photographs, the passage of lived moments into remembered images is more overtly explored. Phipps Johnston has collected family photographs from the first ten years of her life, and then “removes” the figures from each photo. Where children and adults once played, ate, conversed, or posed during a holiday celebration, the replicates fragments of background upholstery, furniture, windows, walls, shadows, etc. to fill the silhouetted-gaps. The resulting images feel as if they had been shattered and then patched (a seam-line around each figure’s contour remains visible). An effect of this excising of bodies is to give primary importance to the mind’s capacity to conjure up the character of a person rather than to allow the photographic representation itself to serve as memory.

Pepe Coronado also presents photographically what is no longer there physically. Printed on Somerset paper to produce the luxurious surface of a charcoal drawing or a softly focused monochrome by Gerhard Richter, these digital photographs bring together planes, lines, shadow and reflection in compositions that suggest the elegance and permanence of ambitious architecture. In actuality, these pristene images capture portable elements temporarily arranged diorama-like in the artist’s studio, existing there only to be photographed and then disassembled and dispersed into new configurations. For Coronado, this circular, ambiguous process of construction, documentation, dispersal and re-construction acts as a metaphor for the broader concept of migration.

Marcy Buchakjian marks time, change, loss and hope sculpturally. Representing one end of the life cycle that seems to motivate her work, are the growing collection of crocheted doilies insistently made by her grandmother who has Alzheimer’s disease. The artist assembles the doilies in varying arrangements, which emphasize not only the strangeness of a familiar, simple form proliferating out of control, but also the individual “personality” of each of these objects despite the rote act of their making. Buchakjian also creates sculptures that evoke the forms of nesting dolls and winds hair into small figures or stitches it into words. In these labor-intensive works, the artist channels her own desire to have a child as if attempting to return a variant of the domestic productivity of her grandmother to a functional end.

Kristin S. Street’s sculptures manifest themselves abstractly, but in the repeated, detailed acts that go into their making, the artist sees an analogy with the mundane tasks that women have undertaken everyday for countless years. Street builds environments by accumulating materials that seem highly synthetic, yet nevertheless manage to reference the body. In one instance, tiny metal filings pierce small square surfaces; some congregate into spare eyelash-like lines, others fill the white ground like stuble overtaking a chin, and elsewhere the filings make circles or v-shapes. Each square surface is framed, and the boxed forms are presented together to create an impressive space of variation and obsessive detail. In another work, countless crusty, fleshy nodes (these look like the skin peeled off of a sugar-coated donut) bob on the end of thin spines inserted into the wall, intruding playfully and strangely into the viewers’ space.

Kelly Maron’s photographs also investigate the formal and conceptual aspects of repeated imagery…but in Maron’s case the imagery is representational. A series of black and white photos of the back of the artist’s head is an exercise in seeing. The changing shape and balance of the negative space between the artist’s neck (clad in a rumpled black turtleneck) and the hair of her imperfectly parted pigtails become the protagonists of the images as the viewer works to understand why one view is different from the next. Similarly, in a grouping of frontal black and white self-portraits, slight differences disturb the overall sense of sameness. However, here, because a viewer must confront the artist’s eyes and other facial features, those differences can be interpreted in terms of personality and mood.

Russ Horvath’s engagement with repetition and modularity is intentionally and effectively restricted to constructing imagery out of identical units. Horvath used a computer application to create a square containing an interlocking geometric pattern that serves as the building block for his sprawling compositions. Transferring the image by hand to square canvas panels, the artist then formats a system of panels across walls and into corners as if playing a game of over-sized, abstracted dominos. Horvath turns panels so that different edges of the single compositional unit meet; forms and backgrounds are completed, ruptured, or mirrored in an exciting proliferation of visual complexity.

Pattern and complexity energize the paintings of Paula Daley. From a distance Daley’s work resolves itself into city scenes and landscapes inspired by her home, Jamaica. But as viewers immerse themselves into the magnificent detail of the vibrant images, webs of emphatic lines and hundreds of minute, individualized lozenge forms begin to suggest biological and even cosmological readings. There is an essential interconnectedness to the elements in the artist’s paintings—each one responding to and depending on the next,—as well as a pulsing of color and animated line that function as visual metaphors for vitality and life.

Layers of vigorous line also characterize Kathy Stratton’s paintings, although the mood here is far quieter than in Daley’s pictures. Stratton builds densely layered images out of angling, slightly arching strokes. Looking at the paintings, a viewer can feel the artist’s hand entering and exiting the surface countless times and imagine that the act of making holds meditative potential for the artist. In some works the strokes dissolve into misty, gray fields, in others they remain deliberate and defined like the overlapping and precise shadows of grasses or bare tree limbs in the densest forest conceivable.

Line and color are literally layered and woven into the painting-sized tapestries of Christina Sundvall. Sundvall’s imagery appears abstract but also deeply connected to the earth’s topography. Rippling variations in brownish tones evoke waves of desert sands and bubble-like formations of blue circles suggest cooling pools. Inserting a provocative, eccentric element into the luxurious weaving, Sundvall at times fills a single one of her pools with orange thread. This deliberate upsetting of the composition’s expected harmony reflects both the sense of control and spontaneity that the artist achieves in her process of weaving.

Cara Ober’s paintings are activated by eccentric juxtapositions that lead to quirky, open-ended narratives. Taken together Ober’s works catalogue a full range of the more humble modes of human inscribing. She references stencils, the patterns of wallpaper and fabrics, tattoos, and illustrations from childhood books. At times, she also allows words to creep into her compositions. Like chipped and fading walls that have begun to reveal overlapping and embedded fragments from years of human efforts at decoration and expression, Ober’s paintings ask viewers to make sense of out-of-place scraps of imagery emerging against worn but still richly colored surfaces.

Frank P. Phillips’s paintings also convey a sense of weathered walls. Here the architecture of those walls—joints, frames, doorways, and even cracks—come to the surface, forming grids that assert themselves from behind veils of distressed paint. The appearance of these paintings suggests a process of rubbing away followed by staining, paralleling efforts to stabilize the material and structural integrity of old wood underneath a new coat of varnish or paint. Thus, surface and structure are inextricably interlaced in Phillip’s imagery.

Anne Walker’s painting of idyllic rural landscapes quietly convey the passage of time. While the scale of the paintings is imposing, the imagery is embracing, delivering the viewer into still, serene moments when hay has been harvested and rolled, and the fields are quiet. Implied in the rolls of hay is that the growing season is over and, for the time being, labor is complete. Walker states that by taking farming as her subject she is investigating a way in which human beings can interact harmoniously with nature.

Julie Labosky Myers actions represent a very personal interaction with nature. Labosky Myers has set herself the task of creating 20,000 wing forms made from dried porcelain. She encases the forms in cement and takes them into outdoor environments where running water can pass through the cement outer structures and dissolve the dried porcelain. For the artist, wings symbolize both conflict and the knowledge needed to overcome conflict. A therapeutic transfer of energy therefore occurs when the wing-shaped clay melts into a river, releasing healing knowledge into the world. At the same time, the emptied cement case remains to remind viewers that Labosky Myers’ intervention in the environment was generated as a response to a troubled world.

Again, there is no easy way to summarize the work produced by this diverse group of artists working in painting, sculpture, photography and ephemeral interventions. Formal and conceptual layering is a motif shared by many of the works, as is a keen interest in repetition and the tiniest details of the construction of an image or object. A searching curiosity about domestic environments and a nostalgic attempt to capture or evoke moments, memories and structures that have evaporated into the past also characterizes much of the work. In the end, however, each artist stands on his or her own in having developed a sensitive body of work that is also quite full of promise for future production.