Thursday, December 9, 2010

MFA 1 Show



Upon walking into the MFA 1 Show, the first thing anyone will notice is the giant boar head spewing fake blood into a huge barrel by Max Cemeno called go ugly early. Needless to say, this mixed media piece was greatly disturbing but in a way slightly cool. Granted I knew it was fake blood (well I really hope it is!) it still has a gross factor. The boars head was mounted on a small wall in the middle of the floor right in your viewing range. Before walking up to it for further inspection, I was wondering how the barrel didn’t already fill itself up! But there is a hose running from the barrel to the bottom of the structure, through the back and back up to the head so it can continue to spew it out. After looking at this piece and walking around it, I was drawn to the installation piece of Erika Hickle called really-nice-sunsets_Large. I love the way these were presented in the show! These tempera on paper with a vinyl background took up the whole side wall. It looks to be the night sky behind the three right after the sunsets. It’s like the process of which the sunset takes place at night. I love that they all look like desert type sunsets like they were taken somewhere in Arizona or somewhere near there. It is not like the normal straight forward painting of a sunset with everything perfectly aligned or looking exactly like a real-life scene. I really like how it looks like the cacti are melting along with all of the other colors present in these pieces. I love how it looks slightly dark and eerie even when it is supposed to be a beautiful sunset. Very ironic yet beautiful at the same time.

In the distance I could hear this weird thumping noise coming from the back room. So I went to check it out only to find as very interesting movie playing. Derek Franklin had a video called complicated relation playing next to two large canvases that looks to have been beat to hell. As the movie played on I could hear a woman’s voice and see her in a dominatrix outfit beating the canvas with a whip and talking “dirty” to it. I was taken aback by this at first because I wasn’t exactly sure what I was even viewing and witnessing. But as I continued to view this video, I noticed that the canvases hanging on the wall next to the tv were the ones she was hitting entitled Reinhardt #7 and Reinhardt #1. These pieces intrigued me quite a bit because without the video, I would have just thought it was paint and holes that were put into the canvas with a knife or something. The video definitely tied everything together for me and really made me enjoy the piece that much more. It made it impossible to ignore with the loud sounds of the video in the room.
I walked across the gallery into the next room all the way into the back where I was confronted with another video that looked like robbers stuck in a chimney. This mixed media installment was by Stefanos Milkidis entitled Entrapment. It was very interesting next to the large installation of what looked like a chimney. I found myself trying to be able to peer into the structure (a failed attempt of course haha) to see if the people were actually still in there! But of course, it must have been pre-recorded, maybe it was an earlier performance piece of the day the show opened. Regardless I did not want to leave the room at first in hopes of maybe seeing the three people all dressed in black like robbers be able to climb out of the hole they are in.


Another artist that really caught my eye was Jim Brittingham with his two mixed media pieces both entitled Untitled. These two had so much color that they pretty much just jumped off the wall at me. It was such an excitement for me to see such beautiful colors that I had to stop and stare for a while. There was a lot of the use of spray paint it seems and a lot of things pieced together to create the whole of the piece. It was very intriguing to look at and wonder what the artist’s intent and thought process was while creating these fantastic and interesting pieces.
I left that room and went back into the main gallery room to exit the gallery. One thing I will admit is that as I was leaving, I again stopped to look at Erika’s work on the wall. It really kept with me all throughout the show. There was one thing however that bugged me about the show as a whole. There were no labels on the wall accompanying any of the pieces in the show and it made it a little hard to know whose work I was looking at. The diagram that was presented at the entrance of the gallery was not very helpful either. Everything was numbered in a very weird way and it was hard to get my bearings of which piece I was looking at in the given moment. I guess you could say it was a diagram leading you through the gallery but to me it was very confusing. Other than that, I did enjoy the show and wish I could meet some of the artist themselves to talk to them more about their work personally.

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