It's not often that a high profile museum curates a show specifically exhibiting just-out-of-school art students, but we're in luck - the Museum of Fine Arts is providing a glimpse into the youngest generation of the art world.
The SMFA Traveling Scholars show is made up of recent graduates of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts who have passed through a rigorous jury process to have their post-graduation work showcased at one of the highest profile museums in Boston. The Traveling Scholar program awards a total of $80,000 to $100,000 annually to promising graduates of the MFA, along with a place in this exhibition.
The simple fact that this is very recent, very cutting edge work makes the show incredibly unique: what we think of as contemporary art encompasses anything in the past 40 years. Very often, truly new work only finds its place in Chelsea galleries or art fairs. This show is a breath of fresh air, all the works having been made in the past two years, with the presentation further emphasizing the just-finished feel of the work. What is immediately apparent is that this work holds no pretensions to status or magnificence, but is simply an honest creative outpouring from some of the freshest viewpoints in art.
Upon immediately entering the show, viewers are faced with a sparse room of framed gouache paintings by Asuka Ohsawa. These paintings are delicate, precise and fantastic scenes painted in a very traditional Japanese style, but given a new voice. Each and every line is calligraphic, flowing smoothly and beautifully along each surface. One would be tempted to link it to contemporary manga, with its flat blocks of color and animated sense of movement, but Ohsawa's work transcends this definition.
In her artists' statement, she traces her work to the giga tradition, or "humorous pictures." Cartoon pigs, wolves and ducks, more human than animal, dance their way across fantastical friezes of faux-neighborhood scenes, as in "On the Street Where We Live" (2005). This work is populated by myriad animal and human characters brought to brilliant life in bright colored gouache. This work is worth seeing if only for its brilliance of draftsmanship and its technical strength. Its social commentary is just more to love.
Bethany Bristow creates engaging little "ritual objects:" concoctions of glass bottles, feathers and candles that recall the celebrations of the Mexican Day of the Dead. These are sprinkled throughout galleries in corners and on the floor. Despite their conceptual nature, the sculptures are beautiful in their gaudy sincerity.
These pieces are on-site sculptures, left in front of sites in Asia that the artist traveled to. The sculptures represent the presence of the artist left at the site, a constant reminder of the inspiration created there. She documents her work in brilliantly-colored photos. The objects provide an interesting link between the process of creativity in the artist and the landscape: the sculptures immediately recall bulbous mushrooms or mini-mountains.
The most forceful and monumental work comes from Audrey Goldstein. She has created human-sized "machines" that invoke a healing environment for the viewer. Her "Generosity Generator" (2006) only requires a set of hands placed in plastic indentations to "project [the user's] innate sense of generosity and empathy."
These machines aspire to be physical, scientific manifestations of things that we tend to think of magical, as beyond science. For the most part, the machines succeed very well: their size, organic forms and steel-and-glass displays give them an air of both authority and possibility. They are playful, yet have a certain gravity.
Linked to Goldstein's sense of science are N. Sean Glover's faux-scientific "plates," prints that aspire towards the resolutely factual, but tend toward the ridiculous. Diagrams, reminiscent of your high school science class, depict snails emerging out of a dissected lunar shell and constellations spelling out numbers and letters.
Not one to shy away from the natural, Aric Mannion's video work shows fog streaming over mountains with water splashing over rocks. The end result is a hallucinatory yet meditative glimpse into the serenity and disorientation of nature, something we may have lost as a shallow society.
All said and done, the contemporary and far-reaching SMFA Traveling Scholars performs extremely well. This unparalleled glimpse into the edge of the contemporary art world is well worth the trip to the MFA. This truly accessible, viewer-oriented show doesn't suffer from the elitism of more status-oriented exhibits.
