Toy soldiers, forgotten lamp shades, and old postcards collide today with the opening of the new exhibit at the Tufts University Art Gallery. The opening reception with the artists is tonight at 5:30.
The exhibit is the first of four Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) thesis exhibitions scheduled for this school year. Students enrolled in the joint graduate degree program with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) and Tufts University participate in exhibitions at the Aidekman gallery every year to showcase their work.
This year, 36 different artists are expected to participate in the shows. The next thesis exhibition is scheduled to take place in early January.
The December show features the work of seven different artists, all of whom work in a variety of different materials and techniques. It will remain in place at the Aidekman Gallery through Dec. 17.
One of the artists, Kathy Halamka, used her time as an SMFA graduate student to contemplate her own background as a person.
"My work prior to this was mainly in the natural realm," Halamka said. "It was just the right time to go in depth with something that had been in the back of my mind for a while."
Halamka's artwork is a combination of photography and printing. She takes photographs, sketches, and other imagery, transforming them into charcoal prints on plywood sheets in a process that she describes as "almost like photocopying."
"I originally worked in caustic painting," said Halamka. "One day, I just discovered I was entranced by what I was covering up. I was entranced by the existing grain of the wood."
The result is a series of elaborative collages, images juxtaposed and pasted together. Many of the pictures come from Halamka's own photography, but she cites a love of old postcards and notes that some old photos come from family albums.
"This body of work revolves around my own personal history," Halamka explained. "But there were no photographs from my mother, so I chose other images instead. It's like I'm adopting a family."
Most people go to thrift shops to find a good bargain, but Maren Denys Bell uses them to find inspiration. Her paintings are done on top of swatches of old fabric, most of which she found at a thrift store in Chinatown.
Bell works the patterns already present on the material into her artwork. She adds painted touches here and there, ominous ravens and tiny toy soldiers, to create a juxtaposition of imagery that makes her viewers question what they see.
Much of Bell's work has an overwhelming warlike quality to it. Green army men lurk in the leaves surrounding a tiger, and helicopters zoom in overhead above a trio of stags.
"I'm exploring violence in society," Bell said. "Soldiers are human violence represented in toy form, and the ravens are more natural. The soldiers are just toys; they're not violent by nature, but the animals are."
Lisa Lunskaya Gordon titled her project "The Medusa Phase" in reference to the adult life stage of jellyfish, when they become free swimming and mature.
"The name was based on the effect that the objects had," Gordon explained. "They formally began to look like organic objects. When I found out that there was a stage called Medusa, the title just clicked into place."
Gordon's art is a collection of three-dimensional collages, made of lamp shades and old telephones. The objects are joined together in hanging sculptures, which are kept in a relatively dark section of the room so that shadows from the lighting create a ghostlike presence on the walls.
"I tried to keep to neutral colors," Gordon said. "They look like the sorts of things you would find in an attic, or very far below the surface of the ocean.
Visitors to the exhibit are given flashlights to explore Gordon's domain for themselves. The interplay of those lights, movements, and the hanging sculptures create a sense of life even in a dusty, quiet space.
The other artists whose work is on display work in everything from painting to sculpture. Long strands of sculpted plastic seaweed, bulbs and tendrils intertwining, play across the wall of Ellen Chambers' exhibit. Nearby, Piotr Parda created a walk-through installation called "Master of Wonders," based on the idea of mental fortitude and trying to bend a spoon with one's mind.
But the new thesis exhibition is sure to satisfy, whether one's artistic tastes run along the mundane or the fantastical.<$>
