Final MFA exhibition’s works explore blurred boundaries of real, abstract
The MFA 4 exhibition opens tonight in the final installation in a series of graduate student art shows. Ryan Sluggett’s painting “Family Limo” is among the work on display.
MFA 4 Exhibition
Today, 5 p.m. through May 6
New Wight Gallery, FREE
By Laura Rivera
April 28, 2011 12:10 a.m.
A young woman playfully holds a gun to another’s heart without reason, babies are lined up in a check-out line and ceramic girls with cameras for eyes stare back at the viewer from inside an isolated house.
Today’s culminating MFA 4 exhibition at the New Wight Gallery expresses worlds between conceptual realms. Paintings and sculptures by the 2011 masters of fine arts students Max Rain, Ryan Sluggett and JungHwa Lee linger between boundaries of the implicit and the explicit, the abstract of dream worlds and a concrete reality.
This liminal quality inhabits Sluggett’s paintings. Fluorescent forms meld into figurations of satirized daily life with a surreal ambience, such as a wealthy family riding in a limousine. Sluggett said he addresses the apparent contradiction between abstraction and social satire in his paintings.
“Abstraction can sometimes not say anything, and satire says too much, so it’s trying to negotiate those two things or balance them to harmonize,” Sluggett said.
Sluggett said his large-scale works contain objects that can be taken for granted if the viewer does not put time into deciphering them.
“The experience (of the painting) gradually accumulates and doesn’t resolve in something you (can) name,” Sluggett said. “I’m interested in looking at something and not quite knowing what it is. It’s a baby or it’s a dream shape that relates abstractly to normal feelings or moods.”
Rain’s wooden relief paintings (painted with shoe polish) capture frozen moments of urban life with little explanation or context to their motions. In an untitled piece, a surplus of monochromatic human bodies perform tasks ranging from dressing to delivering babies with no context in an almost ritualistic fashion.
According to Rain, some of his paintings might have a sense of morbidity or eeriness precisely because of the mystery behind the subjects’ motivations.
His large-scale piece, “Street Scene,” portrays people of varied age groups and ethnicities. People walk in different directions as people who have collapsed lie on the street; another person sweeps up a baby from the floor, and an older person sells flowers.
Rain said that the piece evokes a feeling of helplessness and multiple realities without a direct context or reason for the tragedies.
“I want to draw attention to the way we react and deal with uncomfortable situations,” Rain said. “Like a tsunami that hits Japan and kills thousands … but we deal with these things as if they are part of everyday life.”
Rain said some of his paintings are about shock, sadness and empathy and that they bring up that unnameable feeling and sense of isolation experienced when we hear about these tragedies.
Lee said she draws from the differences between Korean and U.S. culture as inspiration for her installation “You Her And … A House.” She said part of her thoughts on the project derived from social recluses known in Korea and Japan as “Hikikomori.” These people, typically withdrawing from the pressures of over-achieving families, will remain in their rooms for six months, rejecting society and sleeping during the day to spend their energies at night on the Internet or watching TV. In Lee’s installation piece, viewers can peer into a house through peep holes and see the ceramic bodies of isolated young women. However, the sculptures have cameras for eyes that project what they see ““ the image of the viewer staring at them.
“I am mainly interested in the space,” Lee said, “Since it is one room and one person, I was curious about what can be their fantasy because they are totally alone. Maybe they make friends, and it’s a kind of dream … the house and figure are between conscious and unconscious, between boundaries.”
Her house also blurs the perception of the observer-observed relationship, since eyes are also on the beholder. The implication carries through to the rest of the show, playing with opposites in order to create a dialectic harmony.
“People think they are looking from outside,” Lee said, “But maybe the insider is actually the outsider, and the outsider is the insider. It depends (on) how you look.”
