Anyone in need of a peaceful respite from gruelling hours of study over the next few weeks can stroll over to the new art gallery on the second floor of the Arts and Industry Building and spend a few quiet minutes absorbing the diverse projects on display in the Master of Fine Arts graduate exhibition.
The spacious gallery, home to seven exhibits representing the culmination of a three-year program of intensive instruction in the art department's MFA program, is open for free viewing Monday through Friday from noon to 4 p.m. until May 27.
According to Mark Johnson, faculty advisor for the MFA exhibition, the students have been working on their projects for the show for most of the semester. He also said that this is the final step toward achieving a master's degree.
"The students' degree equips them to teach art at a college level," Johnson said.
The exhibits are a collage of varying genres of art ranging from the traditional oil on canvas to not so traditional multimedia and interactive conceptual designs. Of the seven exhibits, three use television, VCR or computers to disseminate the artists' statements. All seven rely heavily on the artists' emotional and intellectual relationship to art on a personal level, an underlying theme throughout the exhibit.
An especially personal exhibit is the mixed-media piece titled "Living on Borrowed Time," created by Guy Kitchen. An illustration of the daily life of a man dying of AIDS, it is narrated in agonizing detail by glass medicine cabinets filled with every-color-of-the-rainbow prescription pills, syringes, a wall plastered with hundreds of hospital bills dating back years and oxygen tubes dangling from the ceiling like limp arms.
Perhaps the most startling and harshest piece of evidence is the oblong glass box containing the bones of the artist's lover, who recently died of AIDS, lying in the center of the exhibit in quiet juxtaposition to the seemingly modern medicine that surrounds him.
Kitchen said of his exhibit, the piece is a "documentation of the intrusive daily demands and rituals of the disease (AIDS), illustrating a system that is bureaucratic, impersonal and without regard for the human spirit."
One of the interactive exhibits uses a computer and a weight machine to convey another artist's statement about women. Heide Solbrig, creator of "How to be a typewriter," hooked up a weight machine to a computer running a well-known typing tutorial on the screen. The weight machine arms act as a 'mouse' and move the cursor, enabling the viewer to participate in the typing program while sitting on the weight machine. It seems that she melds the two seemingly unconnected items, a computer and a weight machine, to portray her beliefs regarding women's position in society. The weight machine symbolizes her belief that society still sees women as objects of beauty while the computer keyboard expresses subservience to men in the work place, contrasting the belief that women in the '90s have as much power and status as men. To fully grasp her intended concept, one needs to take part in this interactive art piece.
These are just two examples of the intensity that exists in the gallery, which houses four complete art shows a year, including two by professional artists and two that are open to all art students on campus, according to Johnson.
"The gallery is here as an educational experience," Johnson said. "The good thing about art is that everybody's reaction is valid; wherever you come at it from, your observation is valid and right. Nobody should be afraid of art because they are afraid to say the wrong thing; there is no wrong way to look at art."