The 2002 Undergraduate Exhibition: WWJD with a BFA?
By Joanne Hinkel
Photographs by J. Luca Ackerman
 The undergraduate BFA show, which ran from March 27 to April 12, is undoubtedly the event of the year for many at The School of the Art Institute, as it provides the opportunity for graduating seniors to show their work to Chicago. Opening night at Gallery 2 was hot and swarming with hundreds of onlookers, voyeurs, parents, and curious people. Gone was the cool, quiet serenity of the contemporary gallery and in its place was an event that felt chaotic and colorful. The sight of several people carrying cotton candy through the crowds, provided by Sarah LeTrendre-Gundersen in her installation space, added to the feeling that this was more of a celebratory festival than an "opening." At some points the spectacle of this event was more overwhelming than the artwork on display. I overheard one person murmur to a friend, "I wish I had sunglasses so I could just watch the people."
There were several beautiful and strange pieces that I remembered and thought about well after the opening, enough to come back on a quiet day for a second look. It's undoubtedly hard to make sense of over 250 works, and would be sacrilegious to try to make any kind of blanket statements about the event. Just consider these the prejudices of one critic:
The most peaceful moment was walking into the installation "Breathe" by Nancy Fleishman. Providing a serene respite from the chaos, this space filled with white porcelain boxes demonstrated the act of that most simple and essential measure of human survival: breathing.
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The boxes, sculpted according to varying degrees of inflatedness and arranged in rows, granted visual form to calm and adequate breaths. These were the kind of ample breaths that you would need to take periodically throughout the rest of the frenetic opening.
Heather Lyon's mysterious and surreal scene of domesticity, which featured a plastic tube filled with milk hung above a stove made of white cloth, and a butter churn and a pair of carefully sewn moccasins, both made of red fabric, was also quiet and contemplative. The entire scene of sculptures, carefully designed with only two colors, lent softness and a nurturing quality to the basics of sustenance: milk, shelter, shoes. A hard counterpart to this soft and clothed design of domestic space was the installation by Brian Ware in which a wood frame enclosed a clothes rod lined with navy suit jackets, a stack of wood beneath and two file cabinets on each side. What could be tucked away or hidden in between these tight layers of masculinity? The function of drawers in Jimmy McBride's piece, as they were standing on the floor, painted blood red and filled solid so as to render them unuseful, was completely distorted, and strikingly static.
Inside an installation space with a video projecting pulsating maggots against the wall, Reese Christian Kruse sat waiting for you. He'd ask you to pick a live fly from a case and a book off his shelf, and then he'd perform an ancient ritual while reading a passage from Titus Andronicus, or whichever book you chose. In the ritual he would drown a fly, then bring it back to life by dousing it with salt. Kruse transformed the aura of dark mystery in his space into magic, and as you left you felt enlightened, as though you saw a miracle or the resurrection of a mini bug messiah. You left wondering who was more on display, though, you or him.
Others used their wall space traditionally, with paintings, film, and hanging hooks. Moses X. Ball's life-sized self-portrait affirming his faith with Christian iconography was touching, especially when one read the accompanying tribute to his grandmother. Tiffany Apolinski's piece attracted many women, and had a group of girlfriends nodding in agreement as I walked by. The piece, made up of scales on which Apolinski had written confessionals of her eating disorder, spoke to an all too familiar female experience and an obsession with weight gain.
While this generation of artists may largely be ready to euthanize painting, it is as yet not dead. Within the beautiful explosion of colors in Jim Falk's untitled painting series lurked ominous forms. In one you could see fragments of a rocket ship and a floating telescope between the flecks of paint, against a blue-sky background, so as to suggest that destruction and violence can be sublimely beautiful. The colors billowed like flames and like flowers.
Perhaps not ironically, the vitality of the painting "Party Party" was a function of its relationship to sculpture. This painting, and all those in the series by Kumiko Murakami, was hung behind the sculpture or still life it depicted, making a connection between illusion and reality. I noticed that a viewer commented in Murakami's journal that this approach had disappointed her, and that her paintings would have been stronger and full of more "mystery" had she not displayed them this way. But doesn't the mystery lie in how, even though we may all see the same things, we each interpret or remember (or paint) them differently? Wasn't the most interesting aspect of the Van Gogh/Gauguin exhibit at the Art Institute to see how the two post-Impressionists would paint the same scene in entirely different ways?
All the beauty was to be found in the photographs. Adam Blumberg's shots of deserted parking lots and empty interstates showed the quiet residue of human traffic, and transformed the significance of traversable spaces, like that of a Nebraska highway, into a stopping point. Ah, the timely, yet elusive promise of an open road, a car, and some time to burn. Is it summertime yet?
The precise and rich colors of the yellow and green flowered curtains in the impossibly small apartment bedroom in Adam Radcliff's photographs were so eye-catching that you barely noticed the body curled up on a small bed in front of them. Here, quality - the beautiful composition of this space - impressed more than the (lack of) quantity, outweighing the smallness of the apartment.
Rachel Ormond's nighttime takes of quiet suburban spaces set aglow by brilliant interior lights were dramatic as Baroque paintings. All that drama, and without any people.
In a show with very few narratives, Jessica Zara Tindall's digital prints (stills from the movie In the Air, In Your Eyes, In Your Bed) showed the journey-turned-cat-fight of one flight attendant, wearing a retro blue uniform, through the airport, quite literally trampling and navigating her wheely bag over other attendants. Though taken out of context from the film, these images were damn cool, slick like fashion photographs but acknowledging of a day when we were entitled to more drama and freedom on the international highway in the sky. Another example of photography's theatrical power was the series of photographs made by Johanna Voos, close-ups of diner food in "Fried Food Makes You Feel Sexy All the Way Home." Dare I admit that I found the pools of grease on a cheeseburger and the intricate textures of fried batter on french fries to be eerily beautiful?
Of the pieces made of found junk or scraps of culture remains, Paul Perkins' and Jeff Driscoll's "Monkey Act" was unforgettable. You could walk into this oversized cage made of transparent tape and garbage including, but not limited to: Doritos bags, candybar wrappers, old prescriptions, an withered dildo, boxer shorts, etc. All we could wonder was, "How the hell did they get this in here?" It looked as though its creators had spent months worth of garbage collecting to construct "Monkey Act." Strange, how something made of throwaway scraps could become permanent.
Sexual lust and desire were confronted head-on by several students. Monashee Frantz's video dealing with seduction and Dale Bogucki's homemade pornographic videos either attracted viewers for the racy duration or embarrassed others enough to leave immediately, which is probably the intention. Frantz's piece relied on your comfort, as it was painted bright red and offered a cozy couch as you approached, but then once you sat down you felt like a voyeuristic creep as you started to watch the video monitors showing two women flirt, undress each other, and then...
One can only guess what the outcome of Isaac Leung's "The Impossibility of Having Sex with 500 Men in a Month-I'm an Oriental Whore" would have been. After much debate with the administration, Leung's piece was taken down becauuse he failed to secure permission from the men whose photographs he used for the piece, which was a visual documentation of a month's worth of his virtual sexual experiences via the internet. Several onlookers jumped to conclusions at the sight of the white paper covering up Leung's space and wrote words to the effect of "censorship sucks."
Some ideas were relentlessly recycled throughout the show, often without effective explanation:
1. Capitalism is oppressive.
2. SAIC is capitalistic.
3. Why isn't "this" art?
What was more interesting than these ideas was the fact that several students decided to allude to points 1) and 2) in paintings or sculptures priced at upwards of $400.
A comical take on such angry art was "$20,000," a letter posted by Michael O'Neill which he had supposedly sent to the NBA Draft Board. In the letter O'Neill states that he is glad to have spent thousands of dollars on an art school education because it made him realize what he really wanted to do with his life - play ball for the NBA.
The best word to summarize the entire event: pluralistic.
The undergraduate exhibition was overwhelming in its multitude of sensory experiences. There were hundreds of works that were not discussed on these pages: architectural plans, performances, films, projects that included computer animation and technological contraptions among them. This article is an entirely subjective judgement call (and several pieces I could not see, such as many of the films and performances, due to time constraints), as is most of the knowledge that we've gleaned from our texts, peers, and instructors while at SAIC.
There is nothing definite about art. Maybe that's why we like it.
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