SFist Goes Back To (Art) School
As an incoming student to California College of the Arts' grad program, we hopped on the chance to meet and greet while scoping out the competition, by infiltrating CCA's MFA Thesis Show opening this past Friday night.
We arrived at CCA just as the party of merry revelers swelled to near explosive proportions. Wading through the throes of young, beautiful art kids squealing with accomplishment (relief!) and air kissing one another with abandon, we pined for our own undergraduate art school days gone-by while snaking in anonymity to see what we could of the show. Artfully dodging the security guard making half-hearted attempts to close the galleries, we were able to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to say. To each his own, though, so visit CCA's 2005 MFA Thesis Exhibition from now until it closes on May 21st, and tell 'em the new girl sent you.
SFist Sarah, contributing
Image of Isaac Lin's greenflorescentpinkorangebrownyellow
We were a fan of Isaac Lin's work long before our left coast arrival, but Night is Also a Sun, the igloo-like house he constructed for this exhibition, reminded us of our own childhood hijinks with the cushions from mom's couch. Built of various boxes and Styrofoam, Lin's fluorescently eye-popping, graffiti-like characters coat the inside walls of his life-sized cave, coaxing the viewer towards its interior light.
Quite the opposite of Lin's intentionally slipshod sun, Matthew Gerring's Moon forms a massive, tautly supple globe of nylon panels meticulously machine-embroidered with craters and other planetary markings. Though a hand-scrawled sign pleaded with us not to touch the artwork, Gerring's ball simply begged us to bounce it with glee. How else would such an object reach its proper place in the sky?
We predict success for Eleanor Hartwood, whose painted, papered collages on panel add a level of eeriness to their landscape with each layer applied. We wanted to see more, even. More spraypaint! More fake wood grain!
Other stand outs included Christine Matson and Ruth Laskey's quietly intelligent variations on the weaving loom, Christina Turner's drawings cut directly from their paper, and Seth Childs' funked-out car installation.
We even returned for a second look on Sunday, losing ourselves in the writings and theses of the Creative Writing and Visual Criticism programs, which left us riled up and ready to write. Thanks, CCA!