High Varnish
We were most impressed by the San Francisco Art Institute’s MFA Vernissage held Friday night in the Herbst Pavilion at Fort Mason, where the show will continue to hang until May 28th. Talk about Pomp and Circumstance! Festooned with regal ceiling banners directing us to each artist’s custom-built exhibition space (the work of MFA graduate Michael Zheng, we found out), the grand hall allowed for ease of movement and a bit of welcome autonomy between each presentation. However, we only noticed this after being greeted by the life-sized, taxidermied rocking horse that is Katherine Worel's The Rocking Horse Winner.
Meticulously crafted as it was, we were ready to dismiss the horse as yet another nod to art star Maurizio Cattelan’s use of taxidermy in contemporary art, when we learned that A. Worel shot the horse herself and oversaw its preservation, and B. onlookers we permitted to interact with the horse, climbing a small ladder to alight its massive rockers as friends and family gawked and photographed.
Photo: Ride'em, cowboy! Katherine Worel's The Rocking Horse Winner greeted us as we entered Herbst Pavillion.
SFist Sarah, contributing.
This sculptural spectacle led us into an exhibition filled with such definite, complete statements; we had zipped through the undergraduate exhibition earlier in the day, noticing what appeared to be a particularly strong photography department, which we’re not so used to seeing. The MFA show proved our theory, as hordes of onlookers gathered before Corey Cloud's matrix of highly saturated, ambiguously narrative, and sometimes goofily staged photographs. In Yoon Lee's process, which appears to involve the dripping, pouring, and perhaps even spinning of acrylic paint, achieving a gelatinous surface that belies, at first glance, the strict control it must have taken to yield such an architecturally sound result. The system of unique symbolism employed by America Meredith fascinated us with its references to "mediaeval manuscript illumination, the Arts and Crafts movement, Mississippian shell engravings, 60s television cartoons, and the Bacone school of painting," in the artist’s words.
Sculptural standouts included the machine-like constructions of Matthew Carver Dan Graber (Ed note: SFist mistakenly attributed Dan's works to the incorrect artist, and apologizes for the error. So sorry, Dan!) and the meticulously wrought fluorescent light installation by Peter Sheridan. While we’ve vowed to visit this show again, as its magnitude surely masked something, we should also note that SFAI published a real, 229-page exhibition catalogue commemorating the event, which isn’t available online (Tsk! Tsk!), but may be purchased for $20 at the exhibition hall.