Last spring, Art in America assistant editor and art critic Brian Boucher visited the first MFA Thesis Exhibition at Rutgers’ Mason Gross Galleries and spoke with each of us artists about our work in the show. From that visit came the following essay, and although it was originally intended to accompany an exhibition catalog, for now I am publishing the essay online with a forthcoming PDF version for download.

Thanks to Brian for his generosity and insight.

An impressive group of young artists is sent out into the world this spring from the Mason Gross Masters of Fine Art program, and it was my pleasure to visit their thesis exhibition this spring.

From the improvised, portable, even disposable paper and cardboard creations of Eric Clausen and Jerry McGuire to meticulously crafted works by Justin Shull and Kevin McCabe, their output varies formally. The emotional tenor of their work, too, ranges widely, from the wry humor of Clausen and McCabe to searching and sincere investigations by Laura Hamilton and Ilse Murdock.

But clear themes emerge, most notably an engagement with ideas of nature and the environment, either re-creating it in paper and cardboard (McGuire), fostering care and observation of it by a mobile, 21st-century naturalist (Shull), asking how one’s practice can express concern for its care (Murdock) or taking its forms as entry points into studies in the nature of space and time (Chris Manzione). Several of these artists also plumb pop culture, whether looking at the narrative conventions of television and film, as in the videos of Ozgur Gungor, or wringing emotional depth out of board game designs, as in sculptures and paintings by McCabe.

Eric Clausen self-effacingly presents his works on paper, taped to the gallery walls, as the doodling of a disaffected schoolchild. His installation is complete with a schoolroom chair-and-desk defaced with a drawing of Superman (with an E in place of the S) and a Metallica logo, and a suitcase decorated with a flame motif, the Pandora’s box that has unleashed this blaze of irreverence. Hundreds of sketches on notebook paper, memo pad sheets and the like hang on all the gallery walls, some of them falling off, with deliberate nonchalance, to rest on the floor. The product of months of endless drawing, there are so many miscellaneous ideas and images that a visitor asking the artist what circumstance gave birth to any particular one is just as likely to get a shrug and a smile as an explanation.

Stretching in just a few inches from light-hearted self-aggrandizement (“Super Eric!”) to wry psychologizing (a reclining figure imagines a tsunami, over the caption “foreshadowing imminent destruction”) to bizarre faux logos (the swooping words INSTANT CLONING appear like a dystopic sci-fi advertisement), Clausen’s drawings plumb his own restless psyche for inspiration and uncover a bottomless well of jokes without punch lines, punch lines without setups, dinosaurs, aliens and superheroes, notes to self and bright geometries. Themes like “seven ways to fuck yourself” and “nine things that piss off [fill in classmate’s name]“ reflect, perhaps, the dark sensibility of a group of freshly credentialed young artists about to be set loose in a society that can barely keep its bankers employed.

In a series of modest but very funny short videos, Ozgur Gungor explores conventions of audiovisual storytelling. Several segments, each introduced by a portentous title in white text on black screen, deftly combine sound and image to signal to the viewer that emotions are called for, but the visuals are comically content-free. “Unveil the mystery” introduces a segment with a billowing curtain of electric blue static, accompanied by an arrangement of strings and tympani that is the cinematic signifier of suspense. “It is going to be a grand new day,” proclaims the text preceding shots of window blinds in a domestic interior, backed by discordant, high-pitched drones. These sounds give way to a lively string quartet playing staccato as we see trees through the window of a moving car or train. Then we’re back for a few moments to the homey setting and a neat little musical flourish that suggests a happy ending, as though a protagonist had gone from an anxious morning at home to a drive in the country and returned with greater peace of mind.

In another short piece, Gungor creates short loops of roller skaters at a popular spot in Central Park over bits of minimal, funky, or otherwise repetitive music to create robotlike caricatures of spontaneous, free expression. And finally, in a delightfully economical summation of the nature of the loop that structures all his works, a black screen displays the words THE END, subtitled with the teaser text COMING SOON.

The photographs in Laura Hamilton’s series “The Perception of Home” explore a family history of fear and violence in an understated voice. Sunny domestic interiors with children’s toys and simple furnishings feature the artist and her mother, daughter and fiancé. Through skillful composition, she creates images that unfold as we look at them; for example, a slightly unkempt bedroom scene, with open dresser drawers and rumpled sheets, gradually divulges, at its left edge, the back of a man seated on the bed. The jolt of suddenly seeing the figure is like that of abruptly finding you’re not alone—and maybe not safe.

In another photo, an image of a brightly sunlit bedroom gains an ominous tone as one notices the shadow of a pair of feet just outside the door, perhaps those of an eavesdropper, perhaps those of someone hiding. A scene of a young mother (the artist) cleaning up a child’s toys becomes shocking when a noose looms into view in an upper corner (I had to have it pointed out to me, though now it’s plain as day). The artist’s control over the viewer’s perception is striking, and the gradual emergence of the signs of trouble is a fitting analogue to the way that a family might at first seem harmonious and placid, and only reluctantly reveal a truer picture.

Chris Manzione offered four sculptures inspired by the research of Rutgers scientist and professor Michael Leyton, who, in books like Symmetry, Causality, Mind, argues that shapes of objects aid the mind in recreating past events. “Asymmetry is the memory that processes leave on objects,” as the artist explained it to me. In Leyton’s words, shape is time: Ingredients of the static present, in Leyton’s view, allow us to recapitulate time. For Manzione, trees became one locus for the study of shape as evidence of time.

Resting on the floor was a 6-foot-high, monstrous, many-horned colossus assembled from several combined casts of a single tree form, painted gray and then sprayed with rust (another indicator of time’s passage). It occupies a convincing place, especially when dropped into a white-cube space for maximum contrast, somewhere between space alien, hybrid rhinoceros, and runaway plant life. Spanning about ten feet over a corner nearby, high enough that one could stand underneath it, was a giant, seemingly organic shape, the same white as the walls. The form was based on a tree’s burl, evidence of a disease quickly overtaking part of the tree’s form. It was as though the very gallery had become diseased, and as though architectural time were racing forward.

In a Naumanesque gesture, Manzione created a cruciform impression in one gallery wall that mimics a concavity in his own chest. On the adjoining wall was a portal-like, roughly diamond-shaped opening about six feet high and a couple of feet wide that suggested a body-sized version of the chest imprint, as though the gallery, at its own scale, were mirroring Manzione’s anatomical quirk.

Kevin McCabe’s fearsomely labor-intensive small sculptures recreate in painted fiberboard objects of pop and high culture that share a measure of the abject. On a plinth stood a stack of volumes of Josef Albers’s book Interaction of Color, books whose prints, the artist explained to me, fade over time and thus become useless. On the floor rested an empty cardboard box that would have held, according to the type, “60 CT/3 OZ PKGS” of Sunshine brand Cheez-It snack crackers, but that now holds only plaster reproductions of Styrofoam packaging peanuts. On another white plinth rested a faux box for Milton Bradley’s game Taboo (“the game of unspeakable fun!”), complete with weathered corners, color scheme of unspeakable teal-by-blue and pink-by-red, and goofy line drawing of a face that is seemingly both embarrassed and self-satisfied.

McCabe’s offerings refer to Andy Warhol’s 1964 Brillo boxes, painted-wood replicas of supermarket cartons of soap pads (and other products). Those canonical works, in turn, reach back to Duchamp’s readymades, everyday objects that the artist transformed into art by designating them as such. Writing about Warhol, philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto once claimed that the Brillo box asked (among other questions), What is the difference between an art object and a non-art object when they are visually indistinguishable? New York Times art critic Ken Johnson later pointed out that Warhol’s Brillo boxes are in fact fairly easily distinguishable from the real thing, since on close inspection they are obviously wood, not corrugated cardboard. By re-creating the books, boxes and game board with stunning exactitude, McCabe brings a new twist to the philosophical and art historical issue, as if finally creating objects that pose the question Danto attributed to Warhol.

McCabe’s richest work in the thesis show, in my view, was a painting that reproduces at 1:1 scale the board of the Parker Brothers’ board game Sorry!, with its snazzy ‘70s design, its brightly colored pathways and characteristic sans-serif font, all imprinted on my mind from my own childhood. The more I studied this humble painting, with its loving reproduction of a truly insignificant object, the more it prompted the question, Who is apologizing? The game? The artwork? The artist? And, in any case, apologizing for what?

In his large paper-and-cardboard sculpture, Jerry McGuire imagines a castoff world made entirely of paper, a paradise of corrugated cardboard. His sprawling and towering landscape, articulated in minute detail, invited my inner adolescent to explore its dark recesses. In its great bulk, it seemed to spring from a drive like the one that pushed Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind to create his Devil’s Tower-style mountain.

McGuire offered at once a fanciful simile of reality and a dark suggestion that even our nature is made up of our own trash. Happily situated near Justin Shull’s vision of a manmade hedge and of artificial trees being reintroduced to the wild, the ensemble brought to mind Radiohead’s song “Fake Plastic Trees” for its redundancy of fakeness piled upon artificiality. There is, in McGuire’s work, certainly much joy taken in creation and in the transformation of discarded materials into an occasion for amazement. Even his discarded cigarette butts, which I at first took to be real butts in a fake landscape, are meticulously crafted from paper. Shredded green sheets become soft, bright grass; crumpled ATM receipts morph into gravel. But elsewhere, even a moment of colorful beauty in the landscape brings us back to a darker side of McGuire’s work: a group of brightly colored butterflies in a tiny recess recalls, the artist told me, images of that creature in traditional vanitas still lifes, where they serve as a sign of the transitory nature of beauty and of all things.

Also taking on concerns of natural and man-made are Ilse Murdock’s paintings, which grow from the question of how to develop a painting practice that expresses 21st-century environmental concerns. One small study explores in a touchingly literal fashion a desire to make the most economical use of the artist’s materials. Murdock uses the bottom edge of the canvas as a palette, leaving the gobs of unmixed paint to become part of the composition, like a confession or a carbon offset-style program for unused pigment and oil.

Murdock’s larger canvases are expressionistic still lifes of flowers, painted with a visually mesmerizing variation of surface and brushwork, the flowers resting in seemingly crumpled clear plastic soda and water bottles that are stripped of their labels (a fitting method of recycling). The surfaces of the large paintings are adorned, or perhaps scarred, with studio trash and various consumer flotsam—packaging materials, plastic bags, and a Styrofoam plate (a keen echo of Julian Schnabel’s crockery). Murdock thus adds to her paintings, depicting some of nature’s most beautiful and ephemeral offerings, examples of humankind’s most embarrassing and doubtless permanent remainders.

Justin Shull’s work playfully plumbs the boundaries between nature and artifice. For his Porta-Hedge project, he outfitted a twenty-foot trailer as a camouflaged portable naturalist’s study, its outside lined with faux fir branches taken from artificial Christmas trees and wreaths. Inside is a meticulously worked wood-paneled room, its low ceiling requiring the visitor to crouch, with a diminutive desk at one end stocked with National Audubon Society field guides to trees, wildflowers, rocks and minerals and the like. With a wicked grin, the artist mentioned to me that it could also include books on American cars or architecture, other elements of the “environment” that an observer might study. Two tiny, caged live birds keep the naturalist company in his study, which is equipped with several small windows at various heights for observation of the surroundings.

In a cracked and funny tribute to Joseph Beuys’s 7,000 Oaks project, Shull has undertaken 7,000 Evergreens, a campaign to introduce artificial Christmas trees into the wild throughout North America; a computer in the gallery displayed a website devoted to the effort, which sardonically echoes nature-management programs and efforts to rehabilitate and reintroduce endangered species. A slide show displays images of the trees sprouting in the unlikeliest places, for example jutting out of a wall in P.S.1 museum’s courtyard, or poking out of a curb in New Hampshire. A tally indicates the project’s progress to date. Though most of the images show the trees looking amusingly incongruous, the project seems to ask the larger question, Does anyone notice when nature is paved over? Is modern mankind’s relationship to the natural environment so diminished, so mediated and distant, that a fake Christmas tree could hide in plain sight among its actual counterparts?

If so, we may be screwed. But artists like Shull and his colleagues may help us preserve some self-awareness, and a shred of humor, as we kiss any natural world goodbye.

Brian Boucher
New York City
April 2009