“Shape and Shadow” at UWM’s Kenilworth Gallery

Expand

Photo via Gallery Night MKE - Facebook

Shape and Shadow Exhibition

It often surprises people to find out that the MFA is the terminal degree in studio art education. Some are surprised to learn that art professors don’t carry some equivalent to a PhD, but most are puzzled to learn that one can get a master’s degree in painting or sculpture in the first place. But of course, you can, just like you can get one in health services administration or applied physics. As someone in possession of this academic distinction, I often say that the real PhD in Fine Art is the thee-year post-graduation process of unwinding the three-year MFA you wound up with.

And that’s not to be flippant; the post-graduation period provides a real-life bath for all the nurture and structure of graduate school to simmer and steep. Where other degrees send you into human resources departments, MFAs send its graduates mostly into private studios and existential quandaries. And this struggle happens to be very good for art making. That leaves us to wonder what to make of an MFA thesis exhibition, which is that degree’s terminal research project.

“Shape and Shadow,” on view in the Kenilworth Building until April 19, features six recent graduates of UW Milwaukee’s graduate program in fine arts: Mich Dillon, Howard Leu, Tanner MacArthur, Andrew McConville, William Justice “Bucko” Crooks, and Rachel Sanders. The work on whole is formally compelling and conceptually stimulating. It has plenty of room to breathe and stretch its ideas in the former INOVA space on Prospect Avenue, and for the most part it revels in the opportunity.

Personal Narratives

Against the east wall taking in light pouring in from the windows, Mich Dillon’s “Intention,” a sprawling installation centered around a gorgeous dirt covered mirror under a suspended wooden beam kept in place by chains, is mysterious, visually seductive. A less economical array of natural objects and wall drawings surround that centerpiece, which easily live on its own as a Mad Max-meets-Walter de Maria kind of uncanny object/environment.

Howard Lue’s adjacent exhibition “Sacred Reverie,” reminded me for a quick moment of what hampers many art programs that mine the depths of students’ personal narratives and then visual connect them to topical issues through. It’s a perfectly reasonable motivation, but also a synthetic one that arises from the bizarre reality-show-scenario that places hopeful students on an island with a team of well-meaning professors desperately attempting to locate an authentic point-of-view. That said, Leu’s meditations on personal identity and cultural history are sensual and enigmatic, especially his rich black gumoil print on rag paper. It’s work with a high ceiling that needs only some time away from the institution to scuff up its knees a little bit. 

Lue’s conceptual counterpoint is “Bucko” Crooks’ show of gold spray painted boxes, bottles, cigarette packs. It looks like he chewed off his straight jacket in year one and started running loose in the asylum. It’s an uneasy pairing: the politeness of contemporary academia and the total fuck-it-all exhaustion of a young art student. It ain’t chocolate and peanut butter, but like Leu, Crooks will be good-to-go after a few years of academic decompression and real-world recalibration. I look very forward to seeing what they produce in the post group-critique world.

High-Tech DIY

Expand

Photo via Gallery Night MKE - Facebook

Shape and Shadow Exhibition

Rachel Sanders’ large-scale colorful, cut and collaged “drawings” on paper feel like personal explorations supplemented but not created by graduate school. They’re fresh and alive and comfortable in their skin. Nearby, the accidental conversation between Andrew McConville and Tanner MacArthur serves as testament to the true collaborative potential of a graduate program. Their shows are wholly individual even as they engage in a silent dialogue across galleries.

McConville’s high-tech DIY esthetic blends the languages of post-minimalism and industrial design in the weirdest way. The works in “Infrascapes” look a little like Donald Judd, a little like Eva Hesse, a little like Peter Halley, if all three collided with the MIT Design Lab. They’re interactive and play with ideas of language and communication. If all McConville’s work was discarded into a back alley and left to the elements for 20 years, Tanner MacArthur could gather its parts and reconfigure them into brilliant formal assemblages. A little John Chamberlain, a little late Frank Stella, and a lot of back-alley detritus, MacArthur’s work evokes a lot of things, but in the end, are something all his own. His pieces at Kenilworth walk a razor’s edge between punk junk maximalism and modernist reductivism with long graceful limbs counterweighted by weights made of crumpled plastic. Accidental color relationships crackle throughout. And, mwah, it just works. And their cast shadows double the pleasure like a Richard Tuttle wire piece. He won’t always have the luxury of pushing off McConville, but it’ll be fun to see what he makes after graduate school.

Who knows what the future holds for these MFAs or the MFA in general. It’s crazy times in both art and academia but shows like “Shape and Shadow” remind us of the potential of academic nurture to prepare students for the real world, but also the inevitable truth that making the best nest naturally involves encouraging all the chicks to leave it one day.