For Those Who Crave Adventure: The Visual Arts Thesis Show Wants to Take You For a Ride

By
Emily Johnson
May 16, 2023

If you hear a hair dryer going off periodically in the sixth floor gallery of the Lenfest Center for the Arts, above a spectral corrugaphone sound wash, it’s just Char Jeré’s Nightmares of Being Straight ( 2022). A row of stations, resembling sinks or salon hood dryers, are covered in newsprint and clay, where it looks like a tireless scientist has been running experiments in the objects and artifacts of Black womanhood: books, beauty products, and Bible verse hand fans; print materials from Essence to No More Police: A Case for Abolition (The New Press, 2022).

There are three floors of the Visual Arts Thesis Exhibition this year, beginning in the lobby of Lenfest. The show, which opened on April 23, 2023 consists of the culminating thesis works of this extraordinary class of artists. Expansive, often intricate installations were especially prevalent this year, artists mapping new imagined worlds into the gallery spaces.

Jeré’s nightmare/dream world has an all-encompassing hyperrealism. You feel you could look forever and still not not have taken in every detail: a cardboard fire extinguisher, a fire hydrant, a dog, a small child with cowrie shell eyes. Hair is everywhere: braids and extensions are like cables transmitting power throughout the scene. Jeré makes a pick comb into something totemic, and bobble hair ties, the pink plastic kind, a leitmotif of girlhood. With their note in the show catalog, Jeré describes this project as “an earthquake salon for my inner child.” 

 

Artwork by Garrett Ball

The sixth floor is also home to Meaghan Elyse Lueck’s petalled, diaphanous bioplastic dome Cella (steel, silk, collected plastics, and algae bioplastics, 2023.) Teardrop-shaped steel frames, some covered loosely in silk, some plastic, cascade in arcs from a central point. You can walk underneath the dome, pull the handle in the center, and the frames lift, like Cella is inhaling. The details are equally enchanting: the flowers pressed in the bioplastics have retained some of their moisture, and dark, rich mold spores have grown, speckling the plastic. In one frame there is a lock of hair; elsewhere, a single shell sewn into the silk. 

Behind a wall was a geometric structure like an aerial greenhouse, a fractalized high-rise, stripped of its drywall, leaving only the wooden framing and delicate rebar behind. This was Sangmin Lee’s Nostalgia without memory (joint compound, white glue, printer paper inkjet transfer, watercolor, rebar tie-wire, glass, wood, brass, and a loofah, 2021-2023), a balanced form allowing light and space and growing things to pass through. 

From white drywall mud, as if the collapsed drywall had reformed into objects, Lee has made stars and petals, leaves and vessels. Plaster flowers on thin stems of rebar tie-wire pass through wood, or grow out of the gallery wall, or hang like a mobile garden from the frames above. In the structure’s inner sanctum, there’s even an elegant chandelier, and a spiny wire starburst. Two rosy styrofoam peaches are hung up, and one pink loofah. 

Lee is from my hometown, Toronto, Canada. His neighborhood was St. James Town, between Sherbourne and Parliament; a dense, ethnically rich high-rise community. As Lee writes in the catalog, “Somewhere between these concrete enclosures and lived space, between drywall and parquet floor tiles, are the stories of cultural survival that center my practice.”

His process is “to make borders into branches, once closed systems porous, overlapping—to create abundance with less, expanding possibilities, as non-linear, as pluralities, and even contradictions.” 

I was struck by how Lee’s work feels like it speaks to Cecilia Caldiera’s installation two floors above, in the detailed creation of new spatial vocabularies.

It was raining outside as I approached the south-facing windows of the eighth floor gallery, just in time to see a flash of lightning illuminate the kite and harp-like shapes of Caldiera’s We Have Been Here Before (steel, paper, ceramic, wood, plastic, and found objects, 2023.)

I had visited Caldiera’s studio during the Visual Arts Open Studios night back in November. Her space then was filled with forms that look like they could have taken flight at any moment. Translucent panels in welded wire frames looked like wings of mechanical insects or early aircraft; wings, antennae, fuselages. 

She used hand painting techniques to print found objects onto mulberry paper treated with encaustic medium. “I weld these frames,” she explained, “which started as a way to get the paper off the wall, to get the light behind it, but now they’re becoming a more structural part of the work.”

Her prints reminded me equally of cave paintings and blueprints: shapely, multiplicitous schematics for a sleek animal or machine, with a tail, with wings, some future thing to ride water or sky. Now it seems she has built the machines promised in those schematics; the flying creatures have come to life.

Wires are strung between gallery walls like delicate power lines. A curved metal structure is suspended from the line, thin as an antenna, a lightning rod brushing the ground, and behind it a sheet of white paper, like a sail. Thinner wires loop and thread through the thick metal frame, so minute and purposeful that it seems electrical, along with clay nodes and neon beads like LEDs. There are tiny pieces of paper, rolled and rosetted and slotted into an angle of mesh, cradled by a spine of mulberry paper. 

That these structures are built according to some incomprehensible logic makes them feel as though they are equipment for a future we can only guess at. Yet they feel handmade, pieced together with care from small, practical, but precious things; seeming to suggest that human ingenuity will create from nothing, from scarcity. Like Da Vinci’s designs for a helicopter, there is something hopeful about these creations. 

Artwork by Paul Rho

Jeffrey Halstead’s Whitney/Lenfest (section of the Whitney Sixth Floor Gallery Wall, sheetrock, way-signage, pictograms, single-channel video projection, color, first contact vinyl (floor to wall) two displays, and computer parts; 3 mins. Looped, 2023) is also a spatial experiment but an utter contrast; a nearly empty space.

Halstead has placed a section of wall from the Whitney Museum in a corner of the Lenfest gallery near the emergency exit door. From a tower of projectors that hum hotly behind the viewer, he projects the corner onto the corner, into which is projected another version of the room. In one of the layers, the room moves, folds outwards in a simulation. Vinyl transfer stickers of the floor and windows of the Whitney lend to the idea of folding two spaces; can one room be present in the other?

I highly recommend the mind-bending trick of getting out your own phone to film your shadow in the projection, just as Halstead’s own shadow-head and phone appear; his camera is capturing the same thing yours is; are you there, or are you him now? It makes a mise en abyme into something like an interactive game. 

Kevin Cobb also enfolds the viewer in his own subjectivity, another contemporary mise en abyme, personal and acute. Cobb’s richly detailed paintings often are framed by his own eye socket, his nose, or his mouth, as if we are peering out from within his head. Staring between Cobb’s eyelashes, or out above his mustache, you catch a glimpse of the painter painting, brush in hand, and the ephemera of his work space, faithfully rendered with attentiveness to perspective and the orbicular shape encapsulating the view.

In the large work What I Was Painted/Drawn to Paint/Draw (Oil, metallic paint, and glitter on linen and panel, 2023) the viewer looks out from between Cobb’s teeth at a more speculative scene; a multitude of artists’ hands and brushes, working on the very piece you stand before, a rainbow mandala of the artist’s mind, a sort of galaxy brain mise en abyme. At the bottom is a console extruding primary paint colors, labeled ‘Knowing’ and a digital wireframe screen showing the artist in a digitized version of his studio. 

Every artist in the show invites the viewer, in their own way, into a new system of thinking. These are by turns haunting, dreamy, melancholy, funny, or just wonderfully beautiful. There are Anna Ting Müller’s skins made of kombucha culture, or Kat Lowish’s velvet-soft paintings exploring the liminality and surreality of childhood. Alison Nguyen’s film installation invites you to view alienation and assimilation through a sci-fi-style American road trip, and Gladstone Butler’s sound installation will make you wonder, what noises do the planets make when they’re alone? 

Arrive with plenty of time to explore; you’ll want every minute you can spare, and the adventurous spirit will be richly rewarded. The Class of 2023 Thesis Exhibition will be available for viewing until May 21, 2023, Wednesday–Sunday, 12–6 pm.