The "Masters" of Fine Art

Just walking into the WSU Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition is enough to put you in a state of confusion.  The seemingly random shapes casting shadows on one wall and the full-size tree surrounded by pillows in the middle of the floor are enough to make you wonder what you just walked into, even without the loud breathing and strange crunching sound blaring from the next room.  The exhibit features the theses of five Masters of Fine Arts students, and even ignoring the sense of utter bewilderment I felt the entire time, I must say I was a little disappointed that this was the best they had produced.

If the five artists had anything in common it was the frustrating, confusing, and possibly intentional ambiguity in each of their works.  It was, for the most part, a display of modern art at its most modern, forsaking visual appeal for a bold statement about life or the human condition.  Unfortunately, this statement was rarely easy to determine and left all but the most motivated observer scratching their heads in confusion rather than thought.

The work of Brad Dinsmore is a good sample of the exhibit.  Dinsmore’s pieces seem to give a sense of the complexity of thought and memory.  His Releasing Ghosts series (2008-2009) consists of several almost identical canvases, each with an almost transparent figure and two Polaroids whose subjects are difficult to determine.  According to Dinsmore, he wants to portray memories in an elusive and general way, focusing on the mood more than sharp detail.  Next come his epistemological pieces, most of which use scribbles and squiggly lines to portray thoughts as being complex and difficult to understand, including his Epistemological Notebooks (2008), several spiral notebooks containing pages of scribbles.  I must give Dinsmore credit here for having the audacity to claim notebooks full of shapeless doodles as comments on the complexity of knowledge, but I am also annoyed by this.  I see his work as a fruitless attempt at depth, and the similarity of his pieces turns an interesting idea into a repetitive, frustrating experience.

Along the same lines as Dinsmore is Dustin Price.  Price’s pieces all show an exceptional attention to detail and a willingness to do tedious work such as weaving the words “We are just fine” into a sweater or organizing small shreds of paper.  His The Sound of Falling Snow (2008) and his untitled tree (full of what appear to be small paper Buddhas) are intricate and, one can imagine, quite time consuming to create.  However, like the rest of Price’s pieces, they lack clarity and any meaning he intended is clouded by thoughts of, “What am I looking at?”  Unfortunately, aside from his large tree (which is quite intriguing), his works lack the aesthetic quality to compensate for their ambiguity or encourage observers to want to look deeper.  Instead of using confusion as an intermediary to provoke thought as he most likely intends, Price confuses his viewers into disinterest and is easily forgotten.

The one artist who I did like was Heather McGeachy.  Her digital paintings utilized light and color very well, and despite being the closest to “traditional” art, her artwork put a new spin on traditional paintings by using clear Plexiglas as a canvas and allowing the piece’s own shadow to contribute to its depth.  Diessa Lowlands (2009) shows a reflected mountain landscape in beautiful shades of red and yellow, while Tyria (2008) is an eerie scene of desolation under ominous gray skies.  Though her paintings may be difficult to discern at first, they invite further examination rather than repel it.  As it turns out, most of her pieces depict scenes from Guild Wars, an online role-playing game.  I feel this detracts a bit from the creativity I initially accredited them with, but on the other hand she is using her art to explore her passions and representing something that I would not normally find interesting in a way that intrigues me.

While the artwork presented in the Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition all required some artistic skill to produce, I can’t help feeling that someone getting a masters degree should be able to present something far better than what I saw.  Only one artist seemed to have brought their best material to the show.  The rest, in my opinion, fell into the trap of trying to say more than they could with their art, and wound up saying little to nothing at all.  I was left pondering the age old question, “Is this really art?”