2010 WLCM BCK SHOW

This past Friday I got the chance to walk around the Mason Gross WLCM BCK exhibition with 2^nd year MFA graduate, Caetlyn Booth. I was able to hear about all the challenges that came across during the curating and how successful it was to work in a group and put this show together. Working as a group, some of the things they had to prepare were, collecting, curating, and installing of the work, food & drinks, and setting up an auction of some pieces.

The works in the exhibition consisted of both grad students and faculty. Each artist was told there was no specific theme throughout the show, so many of the pieces didn’t work well together. The artists were simply told just to submit a small/medium piece yet some of the artists’ smaller pieces were huge compared to others. I choose 4 works from the show that I felt were extremely interesting to discuss in this weeks blog entry.

WLCM BCK

The first piece that caught my attention as soon as I walked in the room was Alan Prazniak’s, “Dreamgirl.” Set in the middle of the room on a pedestal, was a sculpture made from a puzzle and covered with oil paint. Not only does the puzzle alone have great texture, but the splattered oil paints also give the piece great dimension. I really enjoyed his use of bright colors and overall cheesiness of the cheap earrings placed in the hair of this Egyptian head. I felt this piece worked very well in the middle of the room because of Prazniak’s use of color with the other bright pieces throughout the room.

Next, I found Richard Tuttle & John Yao’s homemade book with poems to be a really fun, interactive part of the show. The piece entitled, “ The Missing Portrait” was illustrated by Tuttle and consisted of some of John Yao’s poems.  The typography along with the different shapes and mixed media really worked with this piece. The fact that this piece was interactive really drew me to it. It was very nice to be able to flip through these abstract and very unique pages. The placement of this piece bothered me because it was next to a hallway that led through to another showing room. I found that even though I was very into checking out the book, that the hallway was distracting.

The next piece that I really liked was Anna Bushman’s untitled, interactive wall sculpture. While the piece was very nauseating to look at, I couldn’t take my eyes away from it. Because the piece was marked as mixed media I don’t know the exact material used but the piece was of a mirror with some kind of metal, mesh, piece on top. Trying to look at yourself in the mirror made your eyes and brain go nuts. I also really liked how the mesh material cast shadows on the wall. Because this piece was in the same room as the book, I liked how the two interactive pieces worked together on opposite sides of the room.

My last and favorite piece of the show was Erin Dunn’s paintings entitled, “Whoops.” This three-piece installation was very interesting with its use of mixed media and some kind of resin coating the pieces and dripping to the floor. Dunn likes to bring things from her studio to interact with her pieces and I really liked this idea while looking at the piece. The way Dunn decided to leave the scuffmarks on the pedestal was a very bold decision but I felt it worked very well with her pieces.  The coral like shapes of the piece worked well with the other pieces in this smaller room. I also really liked that you could see this piece from the main viewing room because it was placed in the middle of one of the smaller ones.