The 43rd Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition

may 17–june 16, 2013

Dru Anderson

Dusadee Pang Huntrakul

Erin Colleen Johnson

Sahar Khoury

Jess Rowland

Sean Talley

Each year the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive joins forces with the Department of Art Practice to present the annual Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition. For this, its 43rd iteration, we have taken this collaborative ethos a step further: we invited a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department, Yasmine Chtchourova-Van Pee, to write texts that place each graduating artist’s work in the broader contexts of art and cultural history.

Walking into the exhibition, visitors may be struck by the diversity of materials and concepts on display. However, this is not surprising given the strong alli-ances between Art Practice and other UC Berkeley departments. As a result of interdisciplinary crossover, installations tend to be less object-based and more totalizing environments; some seemingly emerge from the residue of the studio floor, while others reconsider how to use the pedestals and furniture of tradi-tional gallery display.

I encourage you to delve into the exhibition with this brochure in hand. The lat-ter can never fully reveal the former, but it is our hope that another, more inter-stitial experience seeps in from between these lines.

Dena Beard assistant curator

The 43rd Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition

Dru Anderson’s elaborate installations of carefully rendered and lovingly detailed drawings, pastels, oils, and watercolors provide visual environments of seem-ingly inexhaustible extension. The artist’s prodigious output (she finishes at least three works each day and often many more) is driven by a longstanding and dedicated practice of lucid dreaming. For many years now, she has been documenting a series of recurring, ever-mutating dreams. While this mode of working might appear akin to Surrealist experiments in automatism, the intent and effects of Anderson’s practice depart dramatically from this framework. While Surrealist artists reached into the realms of slumber hoping to tap into a transcendent reality—the “sur-” in Surrealism indicating a higher, surpass-ing level—Anderson’s works cast back from the world of dreams a universe of objects more perfect and more vivid than the reality they come to inhabit.

Many of the objects Anderson depicts are taken from a feminine realm of con-sumer goods—feathered earrings, stiletto heels, decorative objects associated with the domestic sphere—which too easily invites the overdetermined language of gendered description. Fragility, delicacy, wealth of detail, ornament, excess, precision, naturalistic representation: all of these, too, have been part and parcel of a simplistic binary logic sequestering women’s art practices from Art proper. However, feminist art historian Marsha Meskimmon suggests that it is exactly elaboration, a seminal aspect of Anderson’s practice, that is crucial to overturn-ing this logic. Elaboration, she notes, “thought through drawing, loses track of [regulatory] time, unlaces binary stalemates, and suggests contingent forms for the articulation of sexual difference.” In a more classical, Freudian vein elabora-tion also emerges as the most radical aspect of the dreamwork. In Freud’s canoni-cal The Interpretation of Dreams, secondary elaboration refers to a process that takes place both in the dream and after waking, in which a “process of expan-sion and embellishment of detail” helps manifest latent content. As such, it is the only element of the dreamwork able to reach into dream and reality alike, bridging conscious and unconscious thought. Anderson’s intricate installations offer us both a personal paean to the feminine and the privilege to witness that most universal of human qualities: the meandering labors of the dreaming mind.

Dru Anderson: Dreamality River, 2013 (detail); mixed-media installation; dimensions variable; courtesy of the artist.

Dru Anderson

Dusadee Pang Huntrakul’s most recent body of work, slyly humorous and gleefully scatological configurations of clay figurines, might belie the scope of the artist’s interdisciplinary practice. Clay is simply the newest material to enter this artist’s protean repertoire, thanks to a fortuitous seminar taught by Bay Area ceramic art-ist Richard Shaw. Huntrakul’s hypertactile pieces tap into the affective qualities of surface and medium while remaining irresistibly cheeky: tiny inquisitive faces grow out of decidedly excremental bodies; wild outcrops of slipshod yet comi-cally insistent penises beckon; clear-glazed surfaces evoke a visceral slipperiness; and miniature white-tipped rice grains turn out to be emulations of gecko poop.

While midcentury critic Clement Greenberg once warned against the use of a particular medium in such a way as to “intrigue us by associations with things we can experience more authentically elsewhere,” Huntrakul’s broader artistic prac-tice can perhaps best be characterized as an investigation into what exactly that “authentic experience” might mean now, in our post-authentic world. His emphatic, willful materiality and often labor-intensive projects—in a recent work he manu-ally traces in pencil each page of Aihwa Ong’s book Buddha is Hiding—are meant to counteract the insect-like automatisms we all use to navigate daily life, or what the artist refers to as life’s “surface logic.” Attaining medium-specific fluency, for Huntrakul, is less an attempt to come to grips with a particular medium as medium and rather a way to reach beyond the surface logic of each city in which he finds himself—Bangkok, Los Angeles, Berkeley. It constitutes a mapping of sorts of the different scopic regimes (culturally specific ways of seeing) of these cities and an invitation for the viewer to experience, through these visceral yet ludic encoun-ters, those habits of mind and eye that inform our own most common impulses.

Dusadee Hunktral: Even Air is Not Slowing You Down, 2012; clay; 21 2/3 × 10 1/4 × 6 1/3 in.; courtesy of the artist.

Dusadee Pang Huntrakul

At heart, Erin Colleen Johnson is a storyteller, a modern-day incarnation of the bards and griots of yore who traveled the land spinning stories and singing songs, weaving intricate tapestries of fact and fiction. Perhaps to set the appro-priate tone one need but mention that Johnson considers Jorge Luis Borges, that most masterful of weavers, a kindred spirit. The kernel from which her works develop is invariably an intriguing anecdote, a harvested fact or little-known history, deepened and elaborated through extensive histori-cal research and an engaged dialogue with various sites and collaborators.

On a formal level, Johnson’s approach is fundamentally situational: the final form her installations and performances take shifts according to collaborator, topic, and means at hand. Her works range from a samizdat pirate radio sta-tion run from an Oakland closet to highly material experiments with the filmic medium, to the most ephemeral of gestures and gatherings. A constant, how-ever, is the deeply collaborative nature of her practice, rejecting the idea of the artist as lone creator and instead diffusing the act of imbuing meaning across a network of agents, both inside and outside the arts. Her collaborators have been as diverse as her own practice: fellow artists, a dancer, a graphologist, an ice fisherman, Morse Code operators, strangers. In that sense her newest work forms a departure of sorts. Based on boxes of handwritten sermons her grandfa-ther, a preacher, bequeathed to her, collaboration here is of necessity conceptual. Johnson is often drawn to the ephemeral, if not the outright obsolete, and to gestures that seem hopeless save to the ones enacting them. This is not a melan-cholic impulse, nor a simply utopian one. Like stories proper, her works are deeply generative; they create echoes and reverberations that reinscribe these forgotten acts back into the social fabric of life, like ever so many tiny chain reactions.

Erin Colleen Johnson: still from Hole #1, 2013; digital video; courtesy of the artist.

Erin Colleen Johnson

Sahar Khoury’s newest works, accumulative yet delicate compositions of found and discarded materials—scraps and notes, bits of fabric, fragments of stretcher bars, repurposed canvas—emphasize touch and their status as products of the human hand. The artist’s expansive structures revel in the liminal and the in-between: they erase the boundaries between studio and artwork, between func-tional space and lived space, cast and object, presence and mimesis, between wall and floor and ceiling. She turns this ontological confusion of figure and ground into the very essence of her practice. The surfaces of Khoury’s works are like topographical maps born from the ever-changing ecosystem of her studio.

Khoury’s working process is one of continual rearrangement. A piece might start as part of a wall—layered accumulations literally attached to and grow-ing out of her studio’s surfaces—then live for a while as autonomous form after having been torn free, and later might be reincorporated into another compo-sition. Other works start as papier-mâché  casts, accrue layers of matter and paint, and have elements screwed and unscrewed, bound, nailed, taken off, plastered over. This cycle of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction, of displacement and relocation, celebrates not only process and artistic labor, but also partial knowledges, the tentative and the slightly off-kilter. The resul-tant “structural vulnerability,” to use the artist’s own words, that characterizes her finished works swaps still-potent mythologies of progress and functional-ity for a perennial state of impermanence and, paradoxically, a laconic there-ness. Khoury’s halting and beautifully imperfect works breed an acute aware-ness of the present in which experiencing the now surfaces as an insurgent act.

Sahar Khoury: Plates and Ball on Shelf, 2012; papier-mâché, inkjet print, leather, acrylic paint; dimensions variable; courtesy of the artist.

Sahar Khoury

Jess Rowland’s artworks and installations explore how sound can be embed-ded and embodied in physically immediate ways, aiming to close the gap between the object that produces sound and sound itself. Her works draw on the sound-conductive properties of rather unexpected materials—copper foil, metal-based inks, photosensitive paper—and the way pattern influences signal. If that sounds rather technical, the concrete phenomenological expe-rience of Rowland’s works is anything but. Guided by a sincere wonder for the existential strangeness of the world (or, as the artist put it, the “intense weirdness of a bag of potato chips”) and inspired by influences as diverse as Sufi mysticism, experimental music practices, and the sequined glitter of camp culture, her works provide an almost alchemical experience—they are living systems, haptic and optic, that often react to the viewer’s body.

Rowland’s latest work is anchored around home-developed arrays of flat audio speakers, made out of sheets of copper foil cut into wild swirling motifs based on Sufi Ebru drawing or expansive fields of repetitive geometric pattern and attached to clear acetate or paper backing. Their handmade aesthetic and glimmering fragility evokes equal parts Joseph Albers, Eva Hesse, and Ziggy Stardust. The patterns accommodate multiple sound signals but at the same time induce varying degrees of signal loss. In the artist’s most recent instal-lation, a custom algorithm feeds the surface arrays randomized sound sam-ples, some created, some scavenged from consumer culture—one consists of a robotized voice reading out the content of the artist’s spam inbox—while ambi-ent sounds and the electromagnetic fields of arrays interacting with those of a viewer’s body generate feedback loops. This creates a highly contingent sound-scape that conjures the sense of being inside an organism that reacts to you as an organism. While Rowland’s fondness for chance, then, points towards an interest in entropy and the scrambling of information, her work also speaks of regen-eration and an infectious joy in the animation and transformation of materials.

Jess Rowland: Tapestry, 2013 (detail); copper foil on acetate; 48 × 18 in.; courtesy of the artist.

Jess Rowland

The  Oxford English Dictionary  defines notation as “the process or method of representing numbers, quantities, relations, etc., by a set or system of signs or symbols, for the purpose of record or analysis.” But what if that set of signs is not unequivocal? What happens when we try to engineer a purely visual language, a notational system of mere shapes and forms? Sean Talley’s body of work is in part a quest for a conclusive visual semiotics, the dream at the heart of modern design and arguably of many a strain of iconic avant-garde art.

Consciously stripped and understated—“tidy,” to use the artist’s word—Talley’s works repurpose the strategies and visual idiom of Minimalism to subtly different ends. An earlier set of drawings, stern black-and-white images of rectangles and irregular polygons, gestures towards Minimalism’s games of permutation and Gestalt, yet Talley’s intricate process complicates that simple matter-of-factness; their monolithic blackness results from the careful and painstaking application and polishing of graphite powder by hand. More recent works, modular ceramics made with the aid of an extruder and a series of colorful pencil drawings, fore-ground the artist’s interest in developing sets of standardized morphemes—his own private alphabets. Talley produces the drawings by experimenting with var-ious ways to hold several pencils in one hand at once, the widths between marks dependent on the number of fingers separating the pencils. The sculptures, com-posed of standardized tubes of extruded clay in a set number of diameters, hold the potential to be continuously rearranged, each new iteration erasing the last. Like the Minimalist objects he draws on, his works eschew the metaphorical and court a certain muteness. Yet he professes he is not so much interested in what gets lost in between each iteration, each permutation, “but in what remains.”

Sean Talley: OJPSDRI, 2013; clay and medium-density fiberboard; 20 × 12 × 10 in.; courtesy of the artist and Jancar Jones Gallery, Los Angeles.

Sean Talley

Dru Anderson lives and works in Oakland, CA and has recently exhibited at the Tallahassee Museum of Fine Art in Florida; Worth Ryder Gallery, Berkeley; and Mills College Art Museum, Oakland.

Dusadee Pang Huntrakul (b. 1978) was born in Bangkok and currently lives in Berkeley, CA. He has exhibited at Bangkok University Art Gallery, Thailand, and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong.

Erin Johnson (b. 1985) lives in Oakland, CA and has exhibited at Southern Exposure, Tenderloin National Forest, Root Division, Zero1 Biennial, and Shotwell Studios in San Francisco; Worth Ryder Gallery, Berkeley; and in North Carolina at Elsewhere Museum, Greensboro, and BookWorks, Asheville.

Sahar Khoury (b. 1973) lives in Oakland, CA and has exhibited at 2nd Floor Projects, Tenderloin National Forest, and Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco; New Image Art, West Hollywood; and Tangent Gallery, Detroit.

Jess Rowland is an artist, writer, and musician currently represented by Edgetone Records.

Sean Talley (b. 1980) received his B.F.A. in 2003 from the San Francisco Art Institute; his work was recently shown at Jancar Jones Gallery, Los Angeles, and Important Projects, Oakland. He lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Texts by Yasmine Chtchourova-Van Pee

Chtchourova-Van Pee is a Ph.D. candidate in History of Art at UC Berkeley, where she focuses on modern and contemporary African art. Her work as a writer and translator has been published in various catalogs and in publications such as Manifesta Journal, Afterall, and Modern Painters.

the annual m.f.a. exhibition at bam/pfa is made possible by the barbara berelson wiltsek endowment.

uc berkeley art museum & pacific film archive bampfa.berkeley.edu