COMPASS 2007

NEW ART FROM UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA MFA PROGRAMS

CHRISTINE GRAY UCSB

Passionate and celebratory of the immense grandeur and exquisite beauty of the natural environment, American landscape painters of the 19th century sought through their paintings to conjure God’s influence on the land and to illustrate His paradise on earth. A heightened color palate and painstakingly fastidious brushwork were central to achieving this opulent and divine illusion. These outsized landscapes, believed to have been painted directly from life, were often comprised of real and imagined multiple views seamlessly collaged. A similar merging of real and fictional forms is central to Christine Grey’s practice and clearly evident in her exquisitely rendered paintings of fantasy landscapes. Whether desert, countryside, or other vast open space, the trees, sand, and mountains in Grey’s environments are thoroughly stylized and refined to their simplest forms. They stand out against exaggerated skies; mackerel or magenta, mauve or streaked with blue. The heightened color and reduced forms evoke not a palpable space but its familiar translation, the exaggerated 2-dimensional imagery of cartoons, video games, and CAD programs. Further emphasizing this allusion is the small scale of the works, with canvases sized like modest computers or television screens. In addition to painting, sculpture plays an equally important role in the production of these works, employing still-lives comprised of cardboard, Styrofoam, paper, pipe cleaners, and other scrap materials. From these elements the artist constructs facsimiles of architecture and uses these models for observational painting. The majestic skies become backdrops to the structures painted center-stage creating an immediate tension between the two painterly idioms, stylized fantasy environment versus observed still-life rendering. She thus revises the 19th century landscape painting, becoming both creator and embellisher of the vista.

RICHARD HALEY UC

Just as Wile E. Coyote’s scrupulously laid plans for snaring Road Runner are invariably doomed to fail despite the thoroughly imagined and fool-proof inventory of the Acme company, Richard Haley’s efforts to realize his harebrained projects remain unfulfilled. Failure is every bit a part of Haley’s practice and essential to the process for he is earnest in his folly and as inventive as an Acme engineer. Like fellow alumnus Bruce Nauman, whose particular spirit of exploration permeates the studios at UC Davis, Haley experiments with photography, sculpture, installation, and video using himself as the subject of his work in an attempt to stretch the limits of what is and can be conceived as viable practice. Digging a Hole with My Body in Multiple Languages depicts Haley throwing himself to the ground, repeatedly and with enthusiasm, undeterred by the earth’s relentless
solidity. Like many of these task-orientated works they reference the performance/endurance works of the 1970s that tested the artist’s physical and psychological limits. The absurdity of Haley¹s act, however, encourages humor rather than terror. In other works the deliberately shoddy production values of his objects provoke an overtly pathetic reading, which purposefully challenges their meaning and value. As evidenced in Exercise in Redundancy-Versions 1, 2, and 3 (2006), a series of historical plaques cast from margarine and marshmallow, their authority is immediately undermined by such ephemeral material. These unstable monuments allude to the “Guns and Butter” theory of national economy that describes opposing ratios for a secure society. Overreaching failure Hermann Goering said, “Guns will make us powerful, butter will only make us fat”. Haley¹s plaques, like much of his work, combines elements of the comic and the tragic, the heroic and the ridiculous, and our alternating thrall in the magnetism of these poles.


DOUGLAS GREEN

Of the three indicators of sociopathic tendencies–bed wetting, fire-setting, and animal torture–Douglas Green is guilty of at least one. Using a lock of hair, a knucklebone, or a photograph as a trophy the serial killer will re-live their conquest with the gruesome talisman, a key component in their elaborate ritual. There is a resemblance of such ritual in the work of installation artist Douglas Green who obsessively collects, catalogues, and documents snails before subjecting them to brutal deaths. Untitled Snail House, 2006, mimics the type of sadistic behavior performed by serial killers; initial nurturing of the prey, ritualized killing, and specific disposal of body, except with snails. Untitled Snail House, comprises a room-sized structure made from cheap transparent plastic that extends to the ceiling and expands into a series of tubular vents that reach up into the rafters (not infrequently a killer¹s secret lair). The 2000 snails, oblivious of their fate, feast undisturbed on a healthy diet of lettuce leaves strewn across the floor but not before being given a name and number that is scrawled across their backs then tabulated and recorded on a graph. Picked off one-by-one, the butchered snails are wrapped in a shroud of copper wire and combined with others to create macabre daisy chain of gastropod corpses to decorate the interior space. Reminiscent of Damien Hirst’s A Thousand Years (1990) that features flies feasting on a rotting cow carcass, copulating and laying eggs, only to be executed by bug zapper Green depicts a comparable doomsday eco-system with an added touch of melodrama-the intense fear that we seek as pleasure. This he achieves through the appropriation of segment from Robert Wise’s film The Haunting (1963), adapted from the novel by the brilliant Shirley Jackson. He has inserted himself, in the form of a cross-dressing ghost, creating images of comic fury and pantomime angst that underscore the camp nature of the gothic romance and our graveyard-whistling obsession with death.

TERRENCE HANDSCOMB

Foreboding and nervy, Terrance Hanscomb’s Der Himmel Uber (the Sky Above) evokes the gritty mood and hard-edged intensity of a cold war spy thriller. Divided into five parts Der Himmel Uber is a complex and compelling film shot entirely in black and white that seeks to conflate
California’s enduring obsession of the body beautiful with a deeply buried and strongly denied death drive. A stream of grainy, smiling portraits of missing Californian children kick off the first part, Totes Engel (Angel of
Death), with the names, dates, and ages of the lost children recited in German. The Teutonic tone, distressed imagery, and litany of lost souls connect present day California and its body tyranny with the physique fascism of Riefenstahl’s Olympiad. The melancholy, although expressed more poetically, continues in Todesfall (Catastrophe). In stark, barren shots of the desert east of Los Angeles is told a tragic tale of bewildered angels whose wings catch fire as they fly across the desert. Unwarer (The Deceiver) is conjured in the following sequence imbuing with dread scene the Strange Wish, where an abandoned drive-in movie theatre is haunted by the faint sound of the Beach Boy’s Surfer Girl hauntingly rendered in the background. The final chapter of Handscomb¹s epic narrative, Nachtrag (Afterward), crosscuts between Venice Beach bodies on display and a circumcision parlor where men are having their penises altered for aesthetic reasons. A clinical how-to-text accompanies the demonstration which is taking place on a banana and is accompanied by 16 year-old Friedrich Nietzsche’s somber musical composition, Misserata.

Handscomb's homage to Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire and Hollywood film noir is a tidy
construction of palpable melancholy and the deferred romance of earthbound angels. The good man in a flawed system, the inability to avoid a recognizable doom; both are analogues of the narrative of German émigrés who helped create this country’s influential film industry. It is an essential component in expressionism, noir, and post-modern angst. Der Himmel Uber fits uneasily into this tradition and Handscomb wouldn’t have it any other way.





KARA HEARN

Children are profoundly selfish (perhaps this is why we are so frequently nostalgic for our youth). Uncurtailed, their behavior can be egotistical and cruel, especially when at play. There is a need for omnipotence and a desire
to force others to do their bidding and execute their narcissistic plans. By the time we grow up, in most cases, it becomes clear that such unchecked impulses are largely intolerable in the world outside the playground but they remain a definite asset in the artist’s studio. Not all artists indulge in such practices but Kara Hearn does, and gleefully, as witnessed in her series of obsessive and witty films where she functions as the director, actor, cinematographer, and set designer. There is something inherently contradictory about her work however; on the one hand it suggests a desire for complete glory (by playing all the roles and having total control) conversely the films resist such lime-lighting by virtue of their low-budget, amateur theatrics and almost introverted nature. Scenes that Made Me Cry is a series of shorts, re-enactments from particular films that had that effect. In each vignette Hearn plays all the characters with minimal alteration to herself. In a reinterpretation of Spielberg’s ET, she is simultaneously the anxious mother, curious son, and alien creature dying on the bathroom floor, cutting back and forth between the characters. What makes this work so compelling is the deliberate lack of artifice and the earnest stamp of the dedicated amateur. The scenes are shot in her studio or apartment without stage management and using whatever props come to mind—a broom becomes Darth Vader’s sword and a student kitchen the site of a charged encounter. The effect is to reduce the cinematic process to its barest essentials, to reveal its artifice, and encourage the viewers to throw themselves eagerly into the recollection and wonder of the children’s garage pageant, the shower concert, and the naughty nurse costume.

JAMES KHAZAR UCSC

Television is the evangelism’s gift from God, its most effective pulpit, and a direct channel into the wallets of thousands of lost souls in need of salvation. There is something much nobler, less partisan, and more spiritual in James Khazan’s preaching practice and exploration of faith -based systems for he uses the computer as a window to people’s souls. Illuminated Dreams is an interactive program built in Adobe Flash that seeks to conflate early Christian beliefs and teachings with dream imagery, narratives, and the collective unconscious; the contemporary equivalent to the visions of martyrs and saints. It is comprised of a lectern structure with a flat screen monitor embedded within. The monitor is vertically orientated to mimic the page of a book and the interactive program consists of Khazan’ substantial personal dream inventory collected over the past two years. Appearing as an illuminated manuscript the program allows the viewer to navigate a path through the dense embedded network of text, image, and aural experiences that may variously lead from one poetic, abstract, or theoretical association to another. Early Christian manuscripts sought to control interpretation of the script through text, image, and annotations in the margins and squeezed in between the lines. Khazan adds his own remarks to the illuminated form, which instead of confining interpretation lead to endless imaginative possibilities and permutations. Khazan’s is hyper- sophisticated medieval, self-directed, teleprompter and persuades the viewer to lose themselves in their own reveries through memories triggered by Khazan’s database of objects, symbols, and text.

CONCLUSION

Above all, COMPASS 2007 has demonstrated the range, diversity, and excellence of practice inherent in the MFA programs within the University of California system, which was hoped for but could be not necessarily expected. Of perhaps greater significance was the range of media and unusual number of inventive singular strategies in the work that set it above what one is accustomed to seeing, suggesting that the spirit of research and genuine exploration is still thankfully very much alive in the UC system. If anything this process has proved that California has retained its commitment to pursuing its own aesthetic vision and while informed by the international style reflected in most regional centers and propagated by the glut of biennials, art fairs, and journals is not necessarily directed by it. It appears that quirk rather than trend drives production in this part of world and is cultivated at the embryonic stage. Is it still valid to regard California as a frontier, outback territory, a place of exploration and re-invention? If so, is it this mythological and fictional identity that drives such idiosyncratic

practice and sets it apart from other places? There is no doubt that the raw wild-west quality of the Southern Californian desert landscape, or edge-of-the-world sensation of the Northern Californian coastline has an impact on the psyche, perhaps providing the physical and mental space for re imagination and the suggestion of endless possibilities. In addition the juxtaposition of such extreme natural architecture with highly sophisticated art centers—Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego—lures exceptional artist faculty from around the world who
are equally inclined to reinvent themselves. Still, California is by no means immune from the harsh cruelties, overt prejudices, and obvious enmity of the art world system. COMPASS 2007 is itself an illustration of art’s competitive and exclusionary nature, a Darwinistic contest of critical strength where judgments are made that either deliver a triumphant knockout or devastating body-blow from which some artists may never recover. It is not our intention to be such arbiters. Ultimately, COMPASS 2007, which began as a survey, morphed into an unexpected celebration of the work of a few talented artists that resisted immediate diagnosis and divination and by doing so provided an enduring and inspiring vision of art across the State.

UCR SWEENEY ART GALLERY & UCR CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY
JULY 29 – SEPTEMBER 7, 2007