Will Haughery and the back of his head in a stele-shaped box as tall as he is.

Haughery, who comes from the Lancaster area, is an amiable young man with a healthy dose of perspective on life as an artist. He gets the p.r. side of things–he sent a personalized email inviting us to see his work, and he was eager to make himself available to walk us through the exhibit.

The most impressive of his pieces, a black wooden sarcophagus/stele with a circular cut-out for a video screen, is a sort of self-portrait–of the back of the artist’s head. A small jiggle indicates the screen is video, and the height is Will’s size. The high-gloss surface is reflective enough to mirror the viewer–without providing intimacy.

As self-portraits go, this one is not giving much away, but the vulnerable neck and the thick tangle of hair provides surprising intimacy amid all the distancing strategies. Tangles of hair and napes of necks are anything but neutral!

When I met Haughery at the Stella Elkins Gallery downstairs at Tyler, he told me he was thinking about a museum display. What I was thinking were thoughts about hiding, death, impermeability, vulnerability, closeness and distance, memory and loss, and time and immortality.

Will Haughery's baby elephant learns a lesson.

The other piece that hit the spot was a stake with a rope, plus a heart-felt image of a young Indian elephant tethered to a stake.  Haughery told me that circus elephants when still calves get tied up like this to train them to stay in place. When the rope is eventually removed, the elephants still behave as if they are tethered. The image, in an aqueous medium on unstretched canvas, has a direct, Roberto Clemente-ish approach to shape and medium.

Like the video self-portrait, the tethered elephant is a self-portrait! But this one is endearing, without the art-world cool. Haughery grew up in a religious household, where he was home-schooled by his mother. He said with wry humor that he is the black sheep of the family–the only one of his brothers who isn’t religious.

Will Haughery, installation shot showing the stake, rope and elephant, and a corner of the third piece, a steel wool egg

Time has help Haughery get to where he is. He’s a couple of years older than his peers at Tyler, having taken time off to work in construction. When he had enough of that he applied to art school. But right now, what really was on his mind was how he was going to pay back his student loans. Art may have to take a back seat, he said.

Seriously Making Fun ran Jan.19 to 22.

There was low energy everywhere, almost.

University of Pennsylvania MFA show at the Icebox. Channeling the underbelly.

Students seemed obsessed with hearth and home–looking for safety from the disaster around them. Eco disaster and urban deterioration were all over the place, channeling the apocalypse and implosion of life as we know it. The relief came in dark humor, and anti-consumerist themes.

Body imagery was all over the place–it was about not feeling well, not looking good, feeling wounded, feeling threatened, feeling absurd. Architecture is crumbling–we saw a lot of beautiful decay. None of these are new themes or strategies, but they do seem to be obsessions permeating the work we saw.

Humor appears! Tyler MFA show, piece by Dustin Campbell. The artist as Sisyphus.

We saw tracks of Web 3.0 all-about-me art all over the place, with the artists featured as the stars of their own videos and photographs. But it’s depressed–the youthful outpourings of Facebook and webcams and blogorrhea. Some of it, although self-focused, still managed to say something big. Some of it, not.

Craftsmanship was off the charts both ways–fabulously crafted and fabulously anti-craft. There were good things in both extremes.

Kelsey Costello's clay buildings are a mix of imagination and memory--at Moore College.

Moore College went high on craft. Penn MFA videos were awesome–when they were functioning. The Penn BFA videos were fine the day we came. Tyler MFAs looked fantastico in their new space, which lent an aura of professionalism and razzle-dazzle that some of the other shows didn’t have. PAFA’s show was more conservative than last year’s show and was actually more conservative than the other college shows we saw, reflecting its more conservative tradition with the focus on still life, figures and landscapes–although we did notice a giveaway–a xeroxed cartoon drawing with a dirty limerick–that broke the mold.

We noticed only one image of Obama–as a superhero–we expected more. We also saw a video and a facsimile of a doctor’s waiting room, touching on issues about our health-care system that we’re all thinking about right now. Boy, was this dark. And all in all, there was not a lot of joy passing around these shows. The kids may not be talking about the economy, but they do seem to be affected by it.