Thesis Exhibition Essay

       It has been my pleasure and privilege to teach the MFA seminar at Montclair State University this year. Working with this group of talented emergent artists has been a challenging and inspiring experience. Over the many months we tackled a lot of big issues - what is art? What is good art? Where does art come from? How does it relate to society? How does it relate to history? How do artists communicate their concerns to others?
       In the give and take of class discussion, I often found myself surprised and enlightened by these students, and left class with lots of food for thought. Drawing on their wide ranging interests and their extremely varied life experiences, they offered insights into areas of arcane knowledge, contemporary technology and the complexities of negotiating the competing pulls of family, jobs and art making. Their curiosity and enthusiasm in turn fed my own as we together tried to make sense of the confusing and apparently amorphous landscape of contemporary art.
       Their art also reflects the broad mosaic that is art today. Working with painting, sculpture, video and digital media as well as approaches that bridge the gaps between these formats, they exhibit an admirable willingness to jettison received wisdom when it no longer suits their purposes and to push open doors that normally remain closed. I have also been impressed by their generosity toward each other, particularly evident as the graduating second year students began to pool knowledge and expertise and pull together to produce the exhibition that this catalogue celebrates. Chimaera, the title they have chosen to exhibit under, offers a tribute to the power of the imagination. The thoughtful and diverse work on display here fully justifies that aspiration.
       As artists, the participants in this exhibition draw on an intriguing mix of source materials. In drawings, projections and video works, Linda Koenemund makes use of imagery appropriated from film archives, porn sites and her own personal history, to create provocative commentaries on eroticism, the apocalypse and human mortality. These are often combined with audio components which may involve appropriated and ambient sounds or may include scripted texts deliberately distorted to create mysterious counterparts to her visual images. Jonathan Baretz plumbs the realms of fantasy and popular culture, pulling together symbols, words, hieroglyphic marks and expressionistically rendered personages to create paintings that vibrate with energy, humor and the contradictions of contemporary life. Owen Oertling's imposing and fanciful papier-mâché� sculptures also revel in contradiction. They are arranged in improbable tableaux that conjure a parallel universe populated by anthropomorphized animals, refugees from the straight-laced business world and mysterious objects making visitations from alien and possibly threatening worlds and realities. Connor Goodman, meanwhile, is drawn to the cacophony of popular culture. He employs the tools of caricature and exaggeration to expresses the absurdity of contemporary realities.
       Tracie Fracasso turns to art history for her source material. She creates dimensional collages in which figures and fragments of landscape drawn from renaissance religious paintings are melded with images culled from newspapers and the mass media to create layered commentaries on contemporary issues. Scott Beil draws on his experiences working with disabled adults to explore the interface of body and mind. His paintings partake of both, making analogies between the interior landscape of the body, the human hand as a mechanical device, the external environment and the mind that mediates between them. Pierre McGuffie turns painting into a mode for exploring the flux of contemporary life. His loosely gestured images, drawn from media and memory and stretched out over canvases that are epic in scale, are designed to create the experience of immersion in the flow of time and space.
       Jamie Allen is an abstract painter whose work, which is characterized by rich earth tones, amorphous organic shapes and flashes of color and pattern, originates in the experience of landscape. However, in her hands, these sources are reshaped to express a sense of the interdependence of form and material, body and world, and organic and inorganic structures and materials. Suzanne Larisse Russo also explores an abstract language, treating the bulky, deliberately awkward sculptural forms upon which she paints as a skin that reveals the vulnerability and fragility of the body which they obliquely suggest.
       An MFA thesis show is both an ending and a beginning - symbolizing the completion of a course of studies and the shift from student to the status of professional artist. I salute the achievements of these talented artists and wish them well in the next stage of their journey.

Eleanor Heartney