Graduate students to exhibit their artwork at the ART MFA Exhibition #1

Jeffrey Hastings, a third-year graduate student in art, once created a to-scale replica of a baseball pitcher’s mound out of two tons worth of unfired clay and decomposed granite. For research, he called the field managers of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the UCLA baseball team.

When he was done with the mound, he tore it down.

“The bigger it is, the more challenging and the more fun it is. I like to work big, I like to work with heavy things and bleed and sweat,” Hastings said.

The mound has since been transformed into “Untitled (Corona No. 5),” a piece in Hastings’ contribution to the art MFA Exhibition #1 occurring in the New Wight Gallery March 3 through March 11.

The first works visible are the paintings of Meleko Mokgosi, a third-year graduate student in art. Home for Mokgosi is Botswana, an African nation that shares borders with Zimbabwe and South Africa. Though Mokgosi said his work isn’t autobiographical, his home is the subject of his art.

Mokgosi said he spent the last three years working on the set of oil paintings that make up the Pax Afrikaner series. The series has four chapters ““ Recto, Full Belly, Satisfaction of Sensation and Good Boy ““ which depict scenes from everyday life in southern Africa.

The paintings contain many indistinguishable faces or faces shrouded in shadow. This, Mokgosi said, was part of an effort to use silhouettes strategically to defer quick judgment of the paintings.

“For an uninformed reader, these present themselves as sort of generic pan-African pictures,” Mokgosi said. “To try to delay that stereotypical response to the image, to the icon, I obscure it.”

Across from and behind the obscured images of Mokgosi’s “Pax Afrikaner” series is third-year graduate student in art Kelly Kleinschrodt’s multichannel video installation.

Though her concentration is in photography, Kleinschrodt works in video because the nature of her work requires a medium that serves her interest in time, she said. Photography, she said, is a medium of frozen time.

One of Kleinschrodt’s concerns is issues of the body, especially from the female perspective. In her work “sonata (for breast pump)” she explores the relationship between the body and the breast pump as an instrument played out by the body through a repetitious loop of a woman using a breast pump, she said.

The final graduate student presenting work for the exhibition is Jane Parshall, a third-year graduate student in art. For Parshall, a painter and a New York native, art did not become a viable option until it was suggested to her by a professor.

“Growing up in New York, you’re always going to museums because there’s a lot of access to art, and I think I always drew a lot, but I didn’t think seriously about being a painter or an artist until I was in college,” Parshall said.

Parshall’s work contains autobiographical elements, including a short video of her father cleaning his riding boots. The majority of her work, however, will be oil paintings, such as “Wallpaper,” a 48 inches by 36 inches oil on polyester that resembles its title as well as a tropical scene.

For all of the students presenting their exhibits today, this project represents the summation of their studies at UCLA.

“I’ve been thinking about these ideas for a long time and it’s just the right opportunity to show it,” Hastings said.