This Friday is the opening of the 2019 Undergraduate Juried Exhibition for the Penny Stamps School of Art and Design. The show will be featuring selected works from Art and Design students, and is sure to be an excellent showcase of the creative and innovative force found in our student body.
The show is on display at the Stamps Gallery on 201 S. Division through December 15th. Its opening reception will be from 6-8pm Friday. Saturday, students who have won awards for their work will be chatting about their work in the gallery from 2-4pm.
Go out and support students making excellent work!
During a gallery visit on a cool Friday, the exhibit was quiet, uninterrupted as a projected screen on the wall played the construction and deconstruction of bread against fragile grid paper. As a common theme, EMBODY is a refinement of material in each of the exhibiting works, a process of transformation that embodies a larger significance.
From the opening entrance into Stephanie Brown’s Am I Enough, the power of material is palpable. There’s a tactile installation in a palette of skin tones, like suits someone could wear on and off in a closet. Following this idea and framed by the poem typed on the wall, is a shirt display with no bleach symbols and an exhibition of different people of colour dressed in them. The meaning is clear: no whitewashing; please wash gently with unlike colours.
The idea of an identity is juxtaposed with clothes and fabrics, the same way we wear biases. But colourism, racism, and the weight of an identity – these are things that are less easily taken off than the way someone might take off a coat.
To a more abstract kind of expressionism with material, How to draw a line by the clenching of a fist by Brynn Higgins-Stirrup explores both the geometric and fluid, with images and sculptures that are inherently tactile, a history of molding folded into their form. It is work that is engaging and dynamic to look at, something that captures attention into the process like a manual of how to create.
There are some interesting, beautiful and abstract shapes, touchable and twisted, such as the grid upon paper like a map, a pathway of how things are created. It’s an exhibit that almost elicits a need to touch and explore the pieces from their nuanced, delicate complexity.
Crossing by Brenna K. Murphy utilizes the same kind of complexity. But it’s a labour of love, painstakingly slow and focused. Within the work, there’s an idea of reverence for the length of lace that looks so breakable and easily tangled. It’s solemn, the motions of deconstructing a sweater for the threads to create something new; deconstructing the old clothes in a process of grief.
It is there, coiled but unexpressed, and the creation of this lace over a long period of time, as if looking for all the time that heals, and creating a sadness that is now tangible – it is an art piece that spans long and delicate across an entire room.
Finally, the closet of the bedroom of / offscreen / by Robert J. Fitzgerald is located near the entrance of the gallery, while the rest is situated near the back, as if a teaser to the private life of a teenage boy. The exhibition uses personal materials, creating a sense of nostalgia as projections of old films play in the intimate corners of an adolescent’s bedroom – between the window shutters, underneath bed sheets, in a sock drawer.
There is definitely something secluded about a bedroom, now opening it up for a glimpse of someone’s individual life. It’s comfortable, excluded from the outside world save for the projections of films that have influence on this privacy.
Each work exploring material to embody a particular narrative, the MFA Thesis Exhibition is worth a trip to the Stamps Gallery.
This past Friday, the Stamps Gallery was abuzz with an eclectic and ageless crowd—twenty-somethings in high-waisted khakis, solemn photographers, sixty-somethings in color blocked heels, an ecstatic ten year old girl in panda covered leggings. Around 7 o’clock Osman Khan, director of Michigan’s MFA Program and Associate Professor at Stamps, picked up the mic to congratulate the exhibiting artists— Brenna K. Murphy, Robert Fitzgerald, Brynn Higgins, and Stephanie Brown— at the opening reception for their MFA thesis exhibition: EMBODY.
Khan beamed, “For me what I’m most proud of is that they have embodied what the school means.” If this collective show may double as an echo of the school itself, then Stamps is an innovative attention to modernity, careful homage to both the consistencies and inconsistencies of developed creative form, and an unabashed questioning of norm.
The first performance of the night was part of Murphy’s three part work, “Crossing.” Situated in the back of the galley, the space is dictated by an elongated bobbin lace contraption. Sitting in a spotlight Higgins weaves the bobbins methodically as onlookers contemplate and are utterly consumed by the absence of breath in the space and the trancelike quality of the weaving.
The multi-media exhibit is a questioning of “how grief can be expressed by and embodied in the physical labor of making.” The performance itself is a hypnotic act of vulnerability that Higgins explains in her own words as a metaphor of grief her teacher gave her so long ago: “separating the bobbins into three groups: ‘it’s like two friends going over a river. First one crosses, then the other follows.’”
In order to view Fitzgerald’s performance of “/offscreen/” the crowd was ushered through an open glass annex out into the lobby of the McKinley Town Centre. Through the glass, the audience watched a suit-glad Fitzgerald move creatively around an empty wood floor. His movements were jumpy, repetitive, and exaggerated. A knowing side-eye and a particularly comic wardrobe addition of goggles enlisted periodic laughter from audience members. At one point he mimicked the movement of a golfer and at another he seemed to be urging invisible comrades to army-crawl with him through trenches.Seeming both puppet and controller of a confused dream series, Robert uses his performance to draw the audience further into the world of his concrete installation of “/offscreen/.” The work is a nostalgia trip that features moving images superimposed on the architecture of a childhood bedroom. In Robert’s words “ by mining the films of [his] adolescence, [he investigates] the construction of masculinity through movement.” A particularly striking projection found underneath the bed sheets highlights the physical language of inter-male compassion and intimacy. If you stay in the exhibition long enough you may be able to overhear two middle aged men discuss John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever” and the way they used to flip their hair in high school.
Higgins’s work, “How to draw a line with a clenched fist” is an exciting juxtaposition of sculpture and video situated in the central passage. Most compelling is the map motif that splays itself over the video projection and reappears as a crumpled piece of sculpture on an opposite table. The video— a black white image of hands manipulating clay—seems oddly destructive when placed in juxtaposition to a striking collection of paper-thin, terracotta colored clay sculptures arranged on a podium by the opposite wall. The meticulous attention to arrangement and material itself externalizes our closest wishes to manipulate, protect, save, and create. In the words of Murphy this exhibit is predicated on the “tenuous nature of knowing a thing.”
Immediately upon entering the gallery, viewers are confronted with Brown’s work, “Am I Enough.” The exhibit is an interactive interplay of word and installation centered by the chilling last line of a poem printed on the wall: “When did you decide who you are?” Adjacent to these words is an installation of a closet filled with hanging human skins. This closet, toeing the line of cliché, is so strikingly unromantic that it is impossible to look away. Its cliché only serves to intensify a deeply familiar notion about the way our skin wears us and we it. In Brown’s words her installation “critiques skin color discrimination and its relationship to self-esteem…illustrating the unconscious decisions made in private spaces.” Her best work is found in her interactive use of language—a packet of poems and a Mad Lib about skin— and in her attention to detail: a stylized vanity decorated with a particular typography of subversive and brilliant quotes by influential African American men and woman (From James Baldwin to India Arie) that made me feel as if they had once sat at that very table and scribbled the thought in their own hand.More than worth a cold walk down S. Division, the EMBODY exhibition is a must-see for all who have ever been confronted by the fact of identity and its material place in the world.
The show will run until Sunday, April 1. A performance of “Crossing” by Brenna K. Murphy will take place from 11:30 – 4:30 pm on Saturday March, 31.
Student galleries feel variegated, if there’s a single word for it. Like leaves that grow into different colours and shapes, it’s an exhibition that doesn’t know what it wants to be yet, a showcase that simply brings the best of undergraduate work into the spotlight.
With whatever two cents I have on institutional theories of art and the artworld – I like these spaces, maybe more than museums because of the modernity, the messiness, the fact that I could probably say ten years down the line “oh yeah, I know that guy – we went to school together. I saw his early work way before he became famous.”
The Creative Body
This was the thought, the primary impression that reverberated while visiting the Stamps gallery downtown, the glowing letters looking sunny off South Division Street through the rain of an Ann Arbor November: this is the future of art right here, in progress, developing, new.
With expansive media use, the content of the artworks are even more diverse, with much of the form and the subject focused with a modern-day lens and astute freshness. Here, the exhibition highlights a kind of innovation in art by Stamps students, ideas shaped by a digital revolution and the shifting notation that this digitalization is beautiful. The interdisciplinary quality, refined by technology, is seen in Audio Reflection by Maddi Lelli, a sound installation coded in TouchDesigner that forms a hypnotic circle that moves with the inflection of a voice, and The Creative Body by Camille Johnson, a paper maché puppet that uses projections and soundscapes to tell its stories, exhibited before in Detroit and Ypsilanti events.
Glacial Archi-Structure
Glacial Archi-Structure by Juan Marco uses collections of data of topographical structures on glacial recession to create beautiful, geometric representations of information. And Lazy Susan by Rachel Krasnick is a laser-cut and digitally fabricated sculpture, forming a delicate spiral of plywood that doubles up as a turntable.
Glacial Archi-Structure
Many of the pieces also reflect current social climates and the stresses of a particular generation, including artworks such as Tortured Housewife by Beth Reeck, which digitally collages 50s advertisement-esque pictures to explore the constrictiveness of societal gender norms, and Finding Peace by Gillian Yerington, a landscape constructed out of recycled wrappers, so that the viewer is quite literally looking at nature that has been shaped by our waste.
Finding Peace
Conversely, much of the art also finds itself in organic expressions, universal sentiments. Others expand the limits of form and material. From Broken Compass by Kara Calvert, which opens up feelings of alienation and emptiness across a cotton fabric canvas of batik dye, to Fold and sew by Grace Guevara, folding and sewing copper metal like fabric, expanding the definition of what fiber could be.
Fold and sew
In the end, there’s a lot of interesting work in the exhibition by some incredible students (and many more not mentioned in the review) – innovative, smart, socially-conscious, or even terribly funny – variegated remains the only word I can think of to describe it, a gallery poised on the precipice of change, of what’s new and contemporary, of students still growing and creating. So be sure to check out the Undergraduate Juried Exhibition before December 16th!
Higgins’s work, “How to draw a line with a clenched fist” is an exciting juxtaposition of sculpture and video situated in the central passage. Most compelling is the map motif that splays itself over the video projection and reappears as a crumpled piece of sculpture on an opposite table. The video— a black white image of hands manipulating clay—seems oddly destructive when placed in juxtaposition to a striking collection of paper-thin, terracotta colored clay sculptures arranged on a podium by the opposite wall. The meticulous attention to arrangement and material itself externalizes our closest wishes to manipulate, protect, save, and create. In the words of Murphy this exhibit is predicated on the “tenuous nature of knowing a thing.”
