Jessica Herzfeld, dirty limerick giveaway at Pafa's BFA and Certificate show.

PAFA BFA/Certificate — Jessica Herzfeld’s giveaway of a hand-colored zerox cartoon (click to read the limerick) was a high point in a show that could have used more energy and wildness.

Itsuki Ogihara, Islamic in White. Ogihara often uses the Minimalist strategy of multiples, but stretches the concept, here, to wallpaper, print, and decoration, just for starters.

PAFA BFA/Certificate — We paid Itsuki Ogihara a visit at her PAFA studio last January and the Japanese artist impressed with her street performance piece (she had used a stencil of cars and trucks in a line to create a pattern on the grimy walls under the Market St. bridge. What she did was wash the walls through the stencils creating a whitish pattern of cars and trucks on the very dark walls). A mural by subtraction, we thought–how clever! Mural Arts should hire her. Ogihara’s a materials girl and her piece in the PAFA show was a nice stencil of joint compound on two book-ended walls that was a stealth charmer. It reminded us of Islamic grid patterns and because it was white on white and book-like, it referenced books with exquisite content like the Koran, the Bible, or illuminated manuscripts.

Manya Scheps, holding her Poached Pack book at Penn's BFA show.

Penn BFA show — Manya Scheps met us at her show to step us through her imaginary creation, the Poached Pack. PP is a fictitious collective. The young artist, who belongs to PP is also a PIFAS collective member (a real collective) and she told us she’s not poking fun but studying the phenomenon of young artists hanging out, doing stuff like organizing shows, having openings, making zines. For her piece, Scheps aka PP organized a real group show of Philadelphia artists. She also produced a book/zine about the PP, a website for them and a video with a faux interview of one of the members. The art show within the art show was actually pretty good and the whole thing is a pretty perfect project for the times.

Nicholas Salvatore's installation at the Penn BFA show.

Penn BFA show — Nicholas Salvatore’s self portrait piece– an array of me-me-me videos around a dentist’s chair — plays with the pleasure, torture and mania of self-revelation in our digital age.

Cecelia Post, You Made Me, video, at Penn MFA show.

Cecelia Post, infrared video of mother possum with baby on its back foraging at night for food.

Penn MFA show — Cecelia Post’s videos are dreamy explorations about the self in the world. Above she is sewing what looks to be a life-sized doll that sits on her body and becomes one with her, in effect creating a new self. Her other video of a possum and baby possum rummaging for food at night captivated not only for its color and its nocturanal voyeurism but also for its evocation of mothers and offspring in general (we speak here as mothers with offspring).

Kurt Freyer's video at the Penn MFA show.

Penn MFA show — Kurt Freyer’s video mixes psychedelia, surrealism, and dream narrative about “Them” and “Us” for something spooky, riveting in parts, and peculiarly wonderful. The crude shed he built to watch the piece in was a claustrophobia chamber that went very well with the paranoia on the screen.

Nicolas McMahon does a star turn in front of his own camera, as a phone-sex provider

Penn MFA show–Posing as a variety of societal rejects and otherwise forlorn or beset characters, Nicolas McMahon stars in his own videos and photos. It’s not a pretty picture. He undercuts the stereotypes we see daily in the media–the poor emphysema victim, the sexy phone-sex purveyor. We gave McMahon a shout-out for outstanding work a year ago, (in the small student photography show accompanying the Through You exhibit at Penn), and we’re still shouting.

Elizabeth Hoy's construction suggests a makeshift survivalism.

Penn MFA show–Elizabeth Hoy’s decaying wall is the metaphor for the whole world and the people in it going to hell in a hand basket. Creaky, crumbly, rickety, leaky, slapdash and makeshift, it looks like urban survivalism to us. Move over. We need to get under that shed, too.

Angel O, Adam: 19 years in utero; the video is situated in an installation that's much like a doctor's waiting room, with gruesome pamphlets for deperate patients. The video loop is about 11 minutes.

Moore BFA show–The big news at Moore is video. Of the two that knocked our socks off, one comes out of the new photography and digital arts department, which is graduating its first group of students. The other, from Angel O, comes out of 2-D fine arts. In Angel O’s Adam: 19 years in utero, the artist plays all the roles, from the baby to the mom to the father, and each of them is horrifying at some level. The scenario of permanent pregnancy and permanent fetal dependency seems perfect for this day of the real-life OctaMom.

Moore BFA show–Megan Jensen’s video, I Live Here, from the photography and digi arts program, uses digi wizardry to cast a loving, yet skeptical, eye on home and on the suburbs, with pop-up hills and dales and houses and signs. The video hits its stride immediately after the first few interior scenes. We get a terrific sense of space and rhythm as we tour the real and the not-so-real Our Town — the ideal delivered with some gentle, questioning commentary. You can catch it here on YouTube.

Moore BFA show–Kelsey Costello (image in introductory post), using humble, low-tech clay and paint, imbues buildings with warm feelings for places from her past. The yearning for a remembered place is palpable.

All three of these Moore artists made us think of the rush of college students returning home instead of setting out on their own, thanks to a shaky economy and a really scary world out there.

Mike Trefehn's installation in his Tyler MFA show. Detail.

Mike Trefehn in front of his word wall in his history museum-ish installation.

Tyler MFA show — Mike Trefehn’s installation looked like something out of a small historical society museum. The artist is mining his family, studying the town his German grandparents settled in and in one case literally walking the perimeter of the town to feel it in his bones. Part performance, part narrative about immigration, work, social class, and all rumination about his own place in the world, Trefehn’s piece actually transforms the currently rampant phenomenon of navel-gazing into something serious and forward-moving.

Nick Barbee, detail from his Tyler MFA show. Pocahantas in the foreground and General Robert E. Lee and his horse in the back.

Tyler MFA — Nick Barbee charmed us with his painted clay figurines that were cruder than kitsch gift shop souvenirs but treading on the same nostalgia for history territory. Barbee’s questioning what heroism is really all about and like Trefehn, Barbee is mining his own past. He’s a Virginia native and all the material in his show was about Virginia. The artist inserted himself into the tabletop arrays of Pochahantas, Gen. Robert E. Lee, John Smith, Mr. Bojangles, Arthur Ashe and the rest by placing painted rainbows, lumpy white clouds and images of himself throughout. He explained that he’s always loved rainbows and clouds and that as a Virginian, he belonged on the table too. Like we say, charming.

An Erin Riley weaving; she also dyes her own yarns.

Erin Riley, from her series of car weavings

Tyler MFA — Erin Riley, whose BFA is from Mass Art, emailed us in early winter to tell us about her work–hand-woven tapestries of cars and car crashes. We looked, we liked and we scheduled a studio visit. We loved the costumed little girl in front of her family car–a childhood that Riley’s own childhood didn’t quite measure up to: “A lot of people died in drunk driving accidents in my life. …I always joke if I don’t make it, I could always sleep in my work, or use it to stay warm. I’ll be fine.”

James Zeske, view of his installation Nomad

University of Delaware MFA — James Zeske, in his Nomad installation, crocheted strips and strung them vertically to frame the walls of his temporary campsite, and he recycled molded styrofoam packing material to deliver a touch of home– niches hung on the wall. The shifts in scale and materials are surprising–a trophy deer head sculpture (I’m not sure if it was plaster or styrofoam) is miniature and unabashedly crude. A sentimental figurine looks store-bought, but the music come out of the fiddle is a small abstract sculpture of lightening-bolt-like pieces. (It’s not easy for an MFA program in Delaware to catch someone’s eye. But here it is, at the Crane, shouldering its way in. This alone is worthy of notice). If Elizabeth Hoy and Penn are urban survivalism, Zesko and Delaware are her deep-woods counterpart.

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.

The Penn MFA thesis show at the Crane, curated by Fleisher-Ollman’s William Pym, had its share of work that stuck to where it was hanging on the walls, but a few things caught my attention:

Damon Reaves, Entertaining, video, TV

I got lucky when I arrived. The gallery sitters that day was Damon Reaves. I stopped to talk to him. Turns out Reaves, who is from Ohio, was awarded the Locks Foundation Post-Graduate Fellowship, and will be using it to work on an artists book here in Philadelphia next year. He said the people who will be mentoring him through the creation of the book, which will include poetry as well as images, are artist Luca Buvoli and poets Tracie Morris and Charles Bernstein.

As it happens, I was rather interested in Reaves’ work–especially his drip piece, Entertaining, a video of ink dripping. The drops splattered a little and made tapping sounds that brought tapdancing to my mind. And the pool expanded to fill the tv screen.

Damon Reaves, After Intermission

I later learned from Roberta (is this whispering down the lane?) that the ink dripped from another piece in the exhibit, After Intermission–an ink-dipped suit hanging over a platform with a mike (and with drips from the suit on the platform). Looking at this latter piece was like looking at documentation of any performance. Once I understood the background, I found it quite interesting–the idea of the ephemeral performance, the idea of assuming an on-stage identity, the idea of blackness as a performance identity, all resonated for me. As for the video, which also was about blackness, even without having the score card this one worked and was quite open to numerous interpretations (again about blackness as a performance identity, just for starters).

Damon Reaves, Conference, acrylic on paper

Reaves also had a 5-panel drawing, Conference, of men in suits, mounted just below the ceiling–all black suits and outline faces. The men’s suits merge and look like an unsurmountable mountain range.

Several of the artists in this exhibit, like Reaves, were interested in their identity.

Ivanco Talevski, Melnikov

Ivanco Talevski‘s fabulous Eastern European-influenced paintings and prints, with their fantastical historicity tickled me, and reflected Talevski’s own search for who he is and his historical and art-historical roots.

The shifting sands of identity behind Jamie Diamond‘s so-called family portraits I will hold off on because Roberta and I curated her into ID, the upcoming exhibit of emerging artists at Projects Gallery.

Shanjana Hahmud, City on the Other Side, transfers and oil on paper

Shanjana Hahmud‘s City on the Other Side, rises from literal to Cecil B. DeMille through the use of transfers along with painting to create a grand landscape of armies and people on the move.

I also loved Simon Slater‘s work, but I think Roberta is going to write about him, so I’ll leave it at that. I just want to add how exciting it is that the Penn show is also traveling to Chelsea June 10. That’s a really smart thing to do.

While I was at the Crane, I somehow got into the University of Delaware MFA thesis exhibit, and my efforts were rewarded with some interesting things. I want to thank Steven Weber of Kelly and Weber for helping me out.

Apparently, the Delaware folks are having a hard time keeping the space manned for all its hours, but I was super interesting in getting in because of an unusually wonderful note I received from one of the artists–Michael Kalmbach (I’m so easily seduced by the personal touch).

Romney, 84 x 54, acrylic on plastic wrapped over felt and cardboard cutout

It turns out Kalmbach’s work was an almost. The giant pieces with their seductive layers of glitzy materials and what-is-it juicy paintings were undercut by his insertion of images of presidential candidates. Without those cardboard cutouts, the materials were seductive promises, like presents, and kind of made me think advertising and packaging and Jeff Koons thoughts.

David Carlyle, untitled, front view

Best of all to me was the completely out of left field Hollywood billboard drama by David Carlyle, surrounded by neon, with an endless skyline and night sky glowing above a sort of diarama of cut-out pink and blue animals, fake and real, running for their lives. I’ve never seen anything quite like this before, and the sense of wildlife in motion reminded me of footage I’ve seen of animals fleeing fires and floodwaters. Epoxy critters are also part of the mix, and the shifting from 2 to 3-D and back again was absolutely mad.

David Carlyle, untitled detail, front view

On top of this Carlyle gives you some rewards for visiting the back side of the movie set. There he has a number of critters hanging out, including one epoxy large-eyed “animal” draped over the scaffolding.

Lauren Vanni, In the Valleys, porcelain; This was the more photogenic of Vanni’s two pieces, but the one I really loved was a set of nesting porcelain containers that looked like a cross between giant ashtrays and petri dishes.

On a more traditional note, a couple of large porcelain sculptures by Lauren Vanni were nice–one quite austere and elegant, one relatively frilly–both quite nice.

While I was there, Lance Winne, Delaware’s coordinator for the graduate programs turned up. He told me that they were upping for another year at the Crane, in the duplex space that BusyBee was using. I asked him how the school could sustain the energy to fill that much space, but, without brushing aside my concern, mainly was excited about continuing with a venue in Philadelphia for the students in the program.

I missed the Tyler MFAs at the Crane, but I did make it to two other exhibits. At Slought was a little show called (it closed May 18), 239 years (divided by 12 artists), with lots of newbies, including Marisa Baumgartner, Mariya Dimov, Donovan Entrekin, Lily Gottlieb-McHale, Faye Kendall, Joyce Kim, Kai Pedersen, David Romberg, Laura Velez, Billy Dufala, John Greig and Lauren Comito.

Lily Gotlieb-McHale’s turning drumps plink and pluck like a music box, but the piece itself is irregular, low-key, and rather Zen. Very nice.

Two works were exceptional.

One was a musical/sculptural piece by Lily Gotlieb-McHale. The technology mixes mechanically plunked notes with computer programing; the composition sounded almost Asian and like rain water. It was wonderfully cosmic and reflective, combining going around, and going nowhere.

The other piece I wasn’t expecting was a movie by David Romberg (yes, that would be Slought curator Oswaldo Romberg‘s son), but it turns out it was pretty darned interesting, began with what seemed like a jejune premise of two young women in a small room behaving seductively in front of the camera. But then a second video lets you see who comes in to interact with les girls. It also gives a view out the door to the gallery behind, with people just walking by. The screening of both videos is side-by-side, in the room where the filming took place.

Filming those who walked in was rather transgressive, given how tarty the girls were being. The gallery setting raises any number of questions about what’s real, what’s inappropriate, who’s in charge, and who’s peeping at what, and just who the performer is and how everyone relates to cameras. The piece also becomes an examination of who controls space.

David Romberg’s video at Slought

I don’t know if the gallery thought it was doing Oswaldo (and David) a big favor by including this work in the exhibit–it certainly could be argued that the decision was ethically dicey–but I thought the video was great!

Aki Torii

PAFA, in its 107th Annual Student Exhibition, continues to have a growing number of its students–both MFAs and certificate students–finding the road to contemporary art.

Adam Hall’s cityscape goes up in smoke, like 9-11, and the singed newspaper clouds capture the lyricism of the smoke and explosions without losing the horror.

The MFAs offered up a lot of installation:

• Aki Torii’s wonderful little mutant creatures shuffling along a two-way highway that climbs the walls, plus his ultra-creepy television-viewing electric chair (eeeeek)
• Ted Sare’s gritty den or p.i. office with 3-D images, 3-D video and 3-D glasses (I’m still rubbing my eyes, but I was disappointed that the effects didn’t work better)
• Adam Hall’s burnt city scape with burnt newspaper clouds (9-11 anyone?)
• Colleen Rudolph’s waltz of the skeleton marionettes (dance step instructions included)
• Becky Potter’s tangled root garden
• and Simona Josan’s window treatment of views of windows.

There was more but I’ll stop there.

Also in the MFA group, Alana Bograd’s paintings have taken on the heavily curtained look of proscenium stages and castle interiors without losing their crazy psychedelic stacks of biomorphic shapes.

Rebecca Ayscough, walking to the wolf day parade (girl)

The certificate students are all busy creating work around a single theme. I especially liked some oversize, loopy, goth prints and a really scary wolf mask by Rebecca Ayscough, with long titles and some sort of mysterious back story with bears and a grandmother. These captured the scary side of myths and fairy tales.

P.J. Smalley

Also on my like list, some paintings by P.J. Smalley, all about food, including people with Mister Softee swirls for heads, and a couple of ideal beauties–possibly advertising models from the ’50s or a couple of modern-day hipsters–licking a donut together. The painting is glorious, the food-obsessed subject with its implied sexuality rather disturbing. Nice combo.

by Jordan Griska

The other standout on my list is Jordan Griska.

I loved the techno-mobius-strip endless tubing, which is the first piece you see in front of the grand stairway of the Hamilton Building. It has twinkly lights and markings suggesting circuit boards and is in the Modernist tradition of looking totally fabricated. Yet for all it’s out-in-space technological look, it also manages to suggest intestines, and I suspect it’s handmade. This is the largest of this body of work. The others are drawings and either smaller versions or maquettes.

by Michael Ciervo

And then there are Michael Ciervo‘s paintings side by side with Griska’s sculpture, also with a brave new world aura. People land in space, and an Alex Katz-like billboard girl wears venetian-blind-striped eyeglasses, her shirt repeating the stripes in its drape. Here, too, there’s the cool, crispness of Modernism. What a surprise!

The exhibits of graduating seniors have their pluses and their minuses. They reward students who already know what they want to say and have a developed a way to say it. They can be pretty demoralizing for those who just stayed the course, did their homework and at the ripe age of 20 or 22 still are without a clue.

These latter are of course the majority.

But these latter students, whose work my eye passes over rapidly and without interest, are not necessarily not going to have great careers, plenty to say, or new ways to say it. The race is not necessarily to the swift.

What really counts for future success is often stick-to-it-iveness and enterprise. That goes for students whose work looks like something, and that goes for students whose work looks like not much going on here.

Nonetheless, since I went to see both the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts graduating students exhibition in PAFA’s Hamilton Building, and the Penn and University of Delaware MFAs at the Crane Art Center, I’ll share some of my favorites from the swift in the race.

First PAFA, which had a number of surprises.

Caitlin Kuhwald, War and Peace: The Burning of Moscow, acrylic on paper. This one confirms Kuhwald’s interest in historical story telling, a perfect fit for her archiving of her current social circle. She also had a series of little doll portraits, called Best Friends. But it was the 2-D work that shone.

Caitlin Kuhwald seems to already have a network going in the Philadelphia area. We’ve seen her work before on artblog, and she’s madly drawing their portraits and lives in scroll-like and scroll-related accordian book formats. The work is quite loveable. btw, there’s going to be an auction of her work before she leaves town –the auctioneer none other than Damien Weinkrantz. Now that’s funny. (It’s June 22, 6-9, auction starts at 7, at 311 Market St., 2nd floor, at Honeymilk)

Another portraitist is Daniel Kornrumpf, who embroiders tiny faces on enormous canvases. The strategy and the technique are terrific and look awfully contemporary. The pieces make me think of how we keep reducing whole, complex works of art to tiny images both in art books and on the internet.

Here’s a closeup of another piece of his. I like the contemporary choice of the subject’s unlikely expression and gesture.

I’m going to do the rest of the images in list form as a photo post.

I liked the prints from Sam Naumick. Not only are they great to look at, but he seems to have some awareness of contemporary visual vocabulary that lifts the work out of academia.

I liked this particular piece by Stephanie Beck, which combines cut paper and maps. This is the second recent use I’ve seen of cut paper and maps–there’s a vintage London map cut-out in the middle of a doily by Meredith McNeal in Abington’s The HandMaking exhibit.

Nora Humpage uses a fluid drawing style mixed with a scary surrealism that caught my attention; the content reminded me of the recent Todt exhibit at Fleisher/Ollman. Humpage won a Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship for her work.

I took some other pictures of work at the PAFA show that seemed to have something good going on. Here’s the set. The exhibit ends June 3.

Penn MFAs

e, by Catherine Martens Betz, made of matchbooks; there’s a detail you can click over to, should you have the urge. This was really pretty swell to look at.

I saw the Penn MFA show under such trying circumstances that I’m not sure I can judge it fairly. But I want to put thank yous out to Jeremiah Misfeldt, Greg of 201 Gallery, and Nick Kripal who conspired to get the Icebox space in the Crane Arts Building open so I could look. Of course the delay, which may have soured my mood a bit, won’t stop me from flapping. So here goes.

Overall, I thought the show seemed a little tame and conventional. But there was still plenty to look at in this exhibit, curated by Arcadia University gallery Director Richard Torchia.

In sculpture, I enjoyed Catherine Martens Betz’s two pieces created by accretion of multiples of a single item–matchbooks in one, keys in the other. A special thumbs up to the matchbook mound.

I also enjoyed three sculptures by Elizabeth Peter. This one is The Silos Tend to Their Flock. Peter goes for archaic-sounding titles, but her work feels quite contemporary. She manages to be sentimental and unsentimental all at once.

Also in this exhibit was Alexis Granwell’s Navigating the Ecstasy I & II, a pink explosion of wall innards that was at Tower Gallery recently (Roberta’s post here).

I liked the baroque overkill of Clay Neigher’s giant montages of cultural excess that look like they’re straight out of Asia. But Asia is not the subject. This one is called The Bus Exploded on the way to Disneyland.

This is Where I put my Blackface, by Kristen Gayle

I liked this video by Kristen Gayle. The whole video was this exaggerated grin with a soundtrack of wild applause. The racial content is devastating. Another video by Gayle of bouncing breast-like shapes (stuffed stockings???) went on for a ponderous 7 minutes. This would have kept its mystery and some humor if it were 15 seconds.

A standout work for emotional intensity was a-three video installation, Preparations, by Lissa Corona. The part pictured above, called Lay Low, is almost Warholian, with the artist looking anxious, crouching behind her husband as he implacably brushes his teeth. My fave was Messenger, another of the three. On the verge of tears, Corona expresses all the ways she hopes she will be remembered–”Tell them …I was always the life of the party. …I want them to be proud of me,” and so forth. Occasionally “My insides are rotten” flashes across the bottom of the screen.

Francesca Pfister’s Subterranean Space series of photos were wonderful to look at. The lighting was great. The metaphoric implications of body innards was nice. And it also made me think of Jeff Wall, not just for his Invisible Man photograph, but for the nether-world in so much of his oeuvre. Pfister finds the beauty in these unsightly spaces. Pfister also showed videos of kitchen work, with a terrific soundtrack of amplified kitchen noises. Unlike the still photographs, however, videos did not provide layers of meaning.

Some other images from the Penn MFAs are on my Flickr set here.
The exhibit ends June 3.

I also stopped for a look at the University of Delaware exhibit, also at the Crane Arts Center, but a criticism session was in progress when I arrived, so I really didn’t get much of a chance to see stuff.

Libby and I ran into Temple Gallery last week with David Kessler to shoot a new video episode of Look! It’s Libby and Roberta. (Look for that soon and see some more photos at my flickr set). Temple is just one spot where you’ll be seeing art by graduating MFA students this Spring. Watch for these exhibits since they’re a good way to spot interesting young talent.

Over at Penn, the MFA students are organizing an open studios event this month that looks to be good. One of the students, Simon Slater, wrote me about it recently. Sales of art from the open studio will help with costs of their 2008 thesis show. (see information at the end)

I asked Simon if we could do an email Q&A just to open a window on the art student brain. He agreed and answered my questions and passed them on to the other students. Debs Hoy responded and Daniel Gerwin sent me a copy of an essay he’d written on a topic related to one of the questions. Below is the Q&A with a few pictures of the students’ work from the blog they’ve set up.

Simon Slater, work seen on the Penn MFA students’ blog

what do you hope to do with your MFA degree?
SIMON – My hopes for my MFA degree are surprisingly mundane. I will hang it on a wall next to my BFA degree. A friend of mine is rumored to be using his MFA degree as a Japanese fan during the hot muggy Chicago summers. The Midwest can be a little weird.
DEBS – Parade it around England and the USA clamouring for sculptural commissions

What’s the future of painting?
SIMON – The future of painting is as Tom Petty sings ‘wide open’. As the painting dialogue becomes more and more abstract the possibilities become infinite. Because of this I feel the future of painting is as brighter than the futures of this years graduating Wharton MBA class.
DEBS – Who Cares?

Deb Hoy. Water Bottle Falls (2007) 15ft high, made from stripped and cut plastic
drinks bottles. Commissioned by Fairmount Waterworks Interpretive Center March 2007. From March 27th the completed cascade will be on display at the Fairmount Waterworks Interpretive Center; Open 10am – 5pm Tues –Sat and 1pm – 5pm on Sundays. Call 215 685 0723 or see www.fairmountwaterworks.com for directions. Said Debs in an email: The sculpture was built last weekend with a group of 26 local Gril scouts. It was a great event in honor of world water day. I was for real when I championed activist and social art!

What is the relevance of Komar and Melamid, Pepon Osorio, Rirkrit Tirivanija, Phil Collins to the discussion of what art is today? Are these artists — who make a kind of activist, in some cases humorous, art — a dead end branch on the art family tree?
SIMON – Personally I find activist art to be a bit tiresome and problematic. There are many of my fellow classmates who would disagree with me.
DEBS – I don’t like to discuss what is art today – it can be a whole host of things
that the Art-elite think it is not. Activism, taking a stance and making a
comment is furtive and relevant. I don’t think its a dead end branch.
DANIEL - (this is an excerpt from a longer essay in which the writer brings up other activist artists like Hans Haacke, Joseph Beuys and the local collective Basekamp only to suggest that real activism and real change take place not in art but elsewhere and that art is somehow better when it’s in (or also in) the realm of the irrational and the metaphorical.)

Notes on a Recipe for Butternut Squash Soup
… It seems to me that one of art’s greatest qualities is its ability to operate in the realm of the irrational and mysterious, regions that cannot be accessed or exhausted by rational exegesis.

…Compare the aforementioned works to a collaborative performance by a large number of organizations, but led in large part by one of America’s greatest performance artists, Dr. Martin Luther King. This work was known as the Civil Rights Movement, and included such memorable pieces as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington. Which among all these works has been more successful as social architecture? Which work acts most powerfully in the symbolic realm? The efforts of Bueys, Basekamp, and Haacke are anemic compared to those of Mathaii, Chomsky, and King. To give the devil his due, one must acknowledge perhaps the ultimate master of social architecture and its aesthetics, Adolf Hitler.

Daniel Gerwin. work seen on the Penn MFA students’ blog

Where are you going after graduation?
SIMON – After graduation I am going to Disney Land.
DEBS – I’d like to stay in Philly doing more of the same in a wider social context.

On a scale of 1-10 (1=pessimist and 10=optimist) what’s your feeling about the future?
SIMON – I am feeling a 20 about my future. If I were a pessimist I would be in law school right now preparing for an exciting future in corporate law. Yep! A bad attitude can ruin a good time indeed!
DEBS – The future is bright, the future is Orange.

What do you think of Saatchi’s online art portal?
SIMON – I think Saatchi is the Gordon Gecko of the art world and I like it. SIMON – Saatchi’s often manic ideas on how to redo and/or reconfigure the machinations of the art world force change. I think the Saatchi online portal is a good start. I like seeing what other art students are up to on Stuart. When I was at the Art Institute of Chicago a prominent painting professor told me that it was now cool to have a website whereas the year before it was uncool. I tell this story because I am constantly surprised how suspicious artists can be of new technologies. I am glad there are people like Saatchi who try to experiment with these new technologies and approaches.
DEBS – Saatchi makes me curse, don’t get me started on the legacy of the YBA’s and the Messianic portals he claims to offer

Gianna Delluomo. work seen on the Penn MFA students’ blog

How much time do you spend in the studio each week?
SIMON - I try to spend as much time in the studio as I can. I think on average I spend 40 hours a week in the studio. I am lucky, I live in graduate student housing here at school. The housing is so terrible that I have no reason to go back to my apartment until I am dead tired and ready to sleep.
DEBS – I don’t count

How much time do you spend on the computer each week?
SIMON – Ahhhhhh heh heh eh ahhhh ummmm alot?
DEBS – Too much

Tony Soprano will get whacked for good this season. Yes or no.
SIMON – I am a loyal reader of Gang Land News. I am also a fan of the Sopranos. Over the years it has become clear to me that the writers of the Sopranos are fans of Gang Land News as well. Many of the Sopranos story lines are ripped from Gang Land. If this writing trend continues I don’t think Tony will be killed. I think Johnny Sack will do what incarcerated Bonnano Family boss Fat Joe Massino did and become the first Capo di Tutti Capo of a crime family to become a rat. As a result, Tony will be arrested on RICO charges and he himself will spend the rest of the season in jail. The season will revolve around Tony’s attempt to distance himself from his crimes. This distancing will be a bloody business indeed. Carmella will finally be forced to confront the fact that her husband is a neurotic sociopath. Doctor Melfi will be killed by Pauli Walnuts. Spoiled Anthony Jr…..who knows what will happen with that oaf. Meadow will try to escape with her milquetoast fiance to a staid upper middle class life. The rest of the gang will vie for the scraps of the crime empire. In the end the sole survivor will be Tony in federal solitary confinement ala John Gotti in Marion Illinois.
DEBS – Pass

I’m really excited about the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Yes or no.
SIMON – I am excited for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie for a very cynical reason. As a kid I bought the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics #1 through 5. When I tried to sell them in college their value had plummeted. I am hoping that the new movie will reinvigorate the market for these comic books and when I sell them I will look like a comic book trading wizard. I can then promote a comic trading forum co sponsored by the Learning Annex and as a result become a cajillionazillionaire and retire by 34. I can then make bad art anxiety free! Dreams do come true Roberta I just know it.
DEBS – I Couldn’t give a crap about TMNT, I’m not 10 years old anymore

Penn MFA Open Studio/Benefit Sale
Friday, April 27, 2007, 5 p.m. – 8 p.m., FREE admission, drinks and refreshments
Morgan Building, the university’s main art studio building, at 205 S. 34th St. (between Walnut and Spruce streets)
–150 drawings, prints, paintings, photography, and sculptures will be for sale at $50, $100, and $150. All proceeds from these sales will support the Class of 2008 Thesis Show.
More information here
Check out the student blog.