exhibition brochure (PDF) - Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ...

The 43rd Annual
University of
California, Berkeley
Master of Fine Arts
Graduate Exhibition
may 17–june 16, 2013

Dru Anderson
Dusadee Pang Huntrakul
Erin Colleen Johnson
Sahar Khoury
Jess Rowland
Sean Talley

The 43rd Annual
University of California,
Berkeley Master of Fine Arts
Graduate Exhibition
Each year the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film
Archive joins forces with the Department of Art Practice to present the annual
Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition. For this, its 43rd iteration, we have
taken this collaborative ethos a step further: we invited a Ph.D. candidate in the
History of Art Department, Yasmine Chtchourova-Van Pee, to write texts that place
each graduating artist’s work in the broader contexts of art and cultural history.
Walking into the exhibition, visitors may be struck by the diversity of materials
and concepts on display. However, this is not surprising given the strong alliances
between Art Practice and other UC Berkeley departments. As a result of
interdisciplinary crossover, installations tend to be less object-based and more
totalizing environments; some seemingly emerge from the residue of the studio
floor, while others reconsider how to use the pedestals and furniture of traditional
gallery display.
I encourage you to delve into the exhibition with this brochure in hand. The latter
can never fully reveal the former, but it is our hope that another, more interstitial
experience seeps in from between these lines.
Dena Beard assistant curator

Dru Anderson
Dru Anderson’s elaborate installations of carefully rendered and lovingly detailed
drawings, pastels, oils, and watercolors provide visual environments of seemingly
inexhaustible extension. The artist’s prodigious output (she finishes at
least three works each day and often many more) is driven by a longstanding
and dedicated practice of lucid dreaming. For many years now, she has been
documenting a series of recurring, ever-mutating dreams. While this mode of
working might appear akin to Surrealist experiments in automatism, the intent
and effects of Anderson’s practice depart dramatically from this framework.
While Surrealist artists reached into the realms of slumber hoping to tap into
a transcendent reality—the “sur-” in Surrealism indicating a higher, surpassing
level—Anderson’s works cast back from the world of dreams a universe
of objects more perfect and more vivid than the reality they come to inhabit.
Many of the objects Anderson depicts are taken from a feminine realm of consumer
goods—feathered earrings, stiletto heels, decorative objects associated
with the domestic sphere—which too easily invites the overdetermined language
of gendered description. Fragility, delicacy, wealth of detail, ornament, excess,
precision, naturalistic representation: all of these, too, have been part and parcel
of a simplistic binary logic sequestering women’s art practices from Art proper.
However, feminist art historian Marsha Meskimmon suggests that it is exactly
elaboration, a seminal aspect of Anderson’s practice, that is crucial to overturning
this logic. Elaboration, she notes, “thought through drawing, loses track of
[regulatory] time, unlaces binary stalemates, and suggests contingent forms for
the articulation of sexual difference.” In a more classical, Freudian vein elaboration
also emerges as the most radical aspect of the dreamwork. In Freud’s canonical
The Interpretation of Dreams, secondary elaboration refers to a process that
takes place both in the dream and after waking, in which a “process of expansion
and embellishment of detail” helps manifest latent content. As such, it is
the only element of the dreamwork able to reach into dream and reality alike,
bridging conscious and unconscious thought. Anderson’s intricate installations
offer us both a personal paean to the feminine and the privilege to witness that
most universal of human qualities: the meandering labors of the dreaming mind.
Dru Anderson: Dreamality River, 2013 (detail); mixed-media installation; dimensions variable; courtesy of the artist.

Dusadee Pang Huntrakul
Dusadee Pang Huntrakul’s most recent body of work, slyly humorous and gleefully
scatological configurations of clay figurines, might belie the scope of the artist’s
interdisciplinary practice. Clay is simply the newest material to enter this artist’s
protean repertoire, thanks to a fortuitous seminar taught by Bay Area ceramic artist
Richard Shaw. Huntrakul’s hypertactile pieces tap into the affective qualities
of surface and medium while remaining irresistibly cheeky: tiny inquisitive faces
grow out of decidedly excremental bodies; wild outcrops of slipshod yet comically
insistent penises beckon; clear-glazed surfaces evoke a visceral slipperiness;
and miniature white-tipped rice grains turn out to be emulations of gecko poop.
While midcentury critic Clement Greenberg once warned against the use of a
particular medium in such a way as to “intrigue us by associations with things we
can experience more authentically elsewhere,” Huntrakul’s broader artistic practice
can perhaps best be characterized as an investigation into what exactly that
“authentic experience” might mean now, in our post-authentic world. His emphatic,
willful materiality and often labor-intensive projects—in a recent work he manually
traces in pencil each page of Aihwa Ong’s book Buddha is Hiding—are meant
to counteract the insect-like automatisms we all use to navigate daily life, or what
the artist refers to as life’s “surface logic.” Attaining medium-specific fluency, for
Huntrakul, is less an attempt to come to grips with a particular medium as medium
and rather a way to reach beyond the surface logic of each city in which he finds
himself—Bangkok, Los Angeles, Berkeley. It constitutes a mapping of sorts of the
different scopic regimes (culturally specific ways of seeing) of these cities and an
invitation for the viewer to experience, through these visceral yet ludic encounters,
those habits of mind and eye that inform our own most common impulses.
Dusadee Hunktral: Even Air is Not Slowing You Down, 2012; clay; 21 2/3 × 10 1/4 × 6 1/3 in.; courtesy of the artist.

Erin Colleen Johnson
At heart, Erin Colleen Johnson is a storyteller, a modern-day incarnation of
the bards and griots of yore who traveled the land spinning stories and singing
songs, weaving intricate tapestries of fact and fiction. Perhaps to set the appropriate
tone one need but mention that Johnson considers Jorge Luis Borges,
that most masterful of weavers, a kindred spirit. The kernel from which
her works develop is invariably an intriguing anecdote, a harvested fact or
little-known history, deepened and elaborated through extensive historical
research and an engaged dialogue with various sites and collaborators.
On a formal level, Johnson’s approach is fundamentally situational: the final
form her installations and performances take shifts according to collaborator,
topic, and means at hand. Her works range from a samizdat pirate radio station
run from an Oakland closet to highly material experiments with the filmic
medium, to the most ephemeral of gestures and gatherings. A constant, however,
is the deeply collaborative nature of her practice, rejecting the idea of the
artist as lone creator and instead diffusing the act of imbuing meaning across
a network of agents, both inside and outside the arts. Her collaborators have
been as diverse as her own practice: fellow artists, a dancer, a graphologist, an
ice fisherman, Morse Code operators, strangers. In that sense her newest work
forms a departure of sorts. Based on boxes of handwritten sermons her grandfather,
a preacher, bequeathed to her, collaboration here is of necessity conceptual.
Johnson is often drawn to the ephemeral, if not the outright obsolete, and to
gestures that seem hopeless save to the ones enacting them. This is not a melancholic
impulse, nor a simply utopian one. Like stories proper, her works are deeply
generative; they create echoes and reverberations that reinscribe these forgotten
acts back into the social fabric of life, like ever so many tiny chain reactions.
Erin Colleen Johnson: still from Hole #1, 2013; digital video; courtesy of the artist.

Sahar Khoury
Sahar Khoury’s newest works, accumulative yet delicate compositions of found
and discarded materials—scraps and notes, bits of fabric, fragments of stretcher
bars, repurposed canvas—emphasize touch and their status as products of the
human hand. The artist’s expansive structures revel in the liminal and the inbetween:
they erase the boundaries between studio and artwork, between functional
space and lived space, cast and object, presence and mimesis, between
wall and floor and ceiling. She turns this ontological confusion of figure and
ground into the very essence of her practice. The surfaces of Khoury’s works are
like topographical maps born from the ever-changing ecosystem of her studio.
Khoury’s working process is one of continual rearrangement. A piece might
start as part of a wall—layered accumulations literally attached to and growing
out of her studio’s surfaces—then live for a while as autonomous form after
having been torn free, and later might be reincorporated into another composition.
Other works start as papier-mâché casts, accrue layers of matter and
paint, and have elements screwed and unscrewed, bound, nailed, taken off,
plastered over. This cycle of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction,
of displacement and relocation, celebrates not only process and artistic labor,
but also partial knowledges, the tentative and the slightly off-kilter. The resultant
“structural vulnerability,” to use the artist’s own words, that characterizes
her finished works swaps still-potent mythologies of progress and functionality
for a perennial state of impermanence and, paradoxically, a laconic thereness.
Khoury’s halting and beautifully imperfect works breed an acute awareness
of the present in which experiencing the now surfaces as an insurgent act.
Sahar Khoury: Plates and Ball on Shelf, 2012; papier-mâché, inkjet print, leather, acrylic paint; dimensions variable;
courtesy of the artist.

Jess Rowland
Jess Rowland’s artworks and installations explore how sound can be embedded
and embodied in physically immediate ways, aiming to close the gap
between the object that produces sound and sound itself. Her works draw on
the sound-conductive properties of rather unexpected materials—copper
foil, metal-based inks, photosensitive paper—and the way pattern influences
signal. If that sounds rather technical, the concrete phenomenological experience
of Rowland’s works is anything but. Guided by a sincere wonder for
the existential strangeness of the world (or, as the artist put it, the “intense
weirdness of a bag of potato chips”) and inspired by influences as diverse
as Sufi mysticism, experimental music practices, and the sequined glitter of
camp culture, her works provide an almost alchemical experience—they
are living systems, haptic and optic, that often react to the viewer’s body.
Rowland’s latest work is anchored around home-developed arrays of flat audio
speakers, made out of sheets of copper foil cut into wild swirling motifs based
on Sufi Ebru drawing or expansive fields of repetitive geometric pattern and
attached to clear acetate or paper backing. Their handmade aesthetic and
glimmering fragility evokes equal parts Joseph Albers, Eva Hesse, and Ziggy
Stardust. The patterns accommodate multiple sound signals but at the same
time induce varying degrees of signal loss. In the artist’s most recent installation,
a custom algorithm feeds the surface arrays randomized sound samples,
some created, some scavenged from consumer culture—one consists of a
robotized voice reading out the content of the artist’s spam inbox—while ambient
sounds and the electromagnetic fields of arrays interacting with those of a
viewer’s body generate feedback loops. This creates a highly contingent soundscape
that conjures the sense of being inside an organism that reacts to you as an
organism. While Rowland’s fondness for chance, then, points towards an interest
in entropy and the scrambling of information, her work also speaks of regeneration
and an infectious joy in the animation and transformation of materials.
Jess Rowland: Tapestry, 2013 (detail); copper foil on acetate; 48 × 18 in.; courtesy of the artist.

Sean Talley
The Oxford English Dictionary defines notation as “the process or method of
representing numbers, quantities, relations, etc., by a set or system of signs or
symbols, for the purpose of record or analysis.” But what if that set of signs
is not unequivocal What happens when we try to engineer a purely visual
language, a notational system of mere shapes and forms Sean Talley’s body
of work is in part a quest for a conclusive visual semiotics, the dream at the
heart of modern design and arguably of many a strain of iconic avant-garde art.
Consciously stripped and understated—“tidy,” to use the artist’s word—Talley’s
works repurpose the strategies and visual idiom of Minimalism to subtly different
ends. An earlier set of drawings, stern black-and-white images of rectangles and
irregular polygons, gestures towards Minimalism’s games of permutation and
Gestalt, yet Talley’s intricate process complicates that simple matter-of-factness;
their monolithic blackness results from the careful and painstaking application
and polishing of graphite powder by hand. More recent works, modular ceramics
made with the aid of an extruder and a series of colorful pencil drawings, foreground
the artist’s interest in developing sets of standardized morphemes—his
own private alphabets. Talley produces the drawings by experimenting with various
ways to hold several pencils in one hand at once, the widths between marks
dependent on the number of fingers separating the pencils. The sculptures, composed
of standardized tubes of extruded clay in a set number of diameters, hold
the potential to be continuously rearranged, each new iteration erasing the last.
Like the Minimalist objects he draws on, his works eschew the metaphorical and
court a certain muteness. Yet he professes he is not so much interested in what
gets lost in between each iteration, each permutation, “but in what remains.”
Sean Talley: OJPSDRI, 2013; clay and medium-density fiberboard; 20 × 12 × 10 in.; courtesy of the artist and Jancar Jones
Gallery, Los Angeles.

Dru Anderson lives and works in Oakland, CA and has
recently exhibited at the Tallahassee Museum of Fine Art in
Florida; Worth Ryder Gallery, Berkeley; and Mills College Art
Museum, Oakland.
Dusadee Pang Huntrakul (b. 1978) was born in Bangkok and
currently lives in Berkeley, CA. He has exhibited at Bangkok
University Art Gallery, Thailand, and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong.
Erin Johnson (b. 1985) lives in Oakland, CA and has exhibited at
Southern Exposure, Tenderloin National Forest, Root Division,
Zero1 Biennial, and Shotwell Studios in San Francisco; Worth
Ryder Gallery, Berkeley; and in North Carolina at Elsewhere
Museum, Greensboro, and BookWorks, Asheville.
Sahar Khoury (b. 1973) lives in Oakland, CA and has exhibited
at 2nd Floor Projects, Tenderloin National Forest, and Galeria
de la Raza, San Francisco; New Image Art, West Hollywood;
and Tangent Gallery, Detroit.
Jess Rowland is an artist, writer, and musician currently
represented by Edgetone Records.
Sean Talley (b. 1980) received his B.F.A. in 2003 from the San
Francisco Art Institute; his work was recently shown at Jancar
Jones Gallery, Los Angeles, and Important Projects, Oakland.
He lives and works in Oakland, CA.

the annual m.f.a. exhibition at bam/pfa
is made possible by the barbara berelson
wiltsek endowment.
Texts by Yasmine Chtchourova-Van Pee
Chtchourova-Van Pee is a Ph.D. candidate in
History of Art at UC Berkeley, where she focuses
on modern and contemporary African art. Her
work as a writer and translator has been published
in various catalogs and in publications such as
Manifesta Journal, Afterall, and Modern Painters.
uc berkeley art museum & pacific film archive
bampfa.berkeley.edu