The Wake

For the Master of Fine Arts Exhibitions at the University’s Katherine E. Nash Gallery, a vision is a vision no matter how twisted. The piece entitled “Surreal Fantastic” is not artist Jonathan Bridges’ favorite by any means. In fact, he finds it to be the most random of his selections.

And still, there is something undeniable about it. “Surreal Fantastic” is, after all, an image depicting two nondescript clay bodies sculpted by Bridges in a rather compromising position. To top it off, his head is superimposed over both.

“A woman who saw it said it best,” smiles the Kansas native. “No one knows you better than yourself when you’re getting fucked.”

Bridges is one of five graduate students with work on display at the Nash, each with their own distinct message to send. The exhibit also features Ryan Chamberlain, Patricia Healy McMeans, Eric William Carroll, and Kirsten Peterson.

“An MFA is like an artist’s Ph.D.,” gallery director Nick Shanks explains. “This is the chance for the public to see some really cutting-edge visual work.”

Bridges’ sculptures specifically follow these themes of the beauty beneath the grotesque. The haunting “Guardians of Possibility,” meant as a 21st-century interpretation of ancient Chinese tomb gardens, combine the most graceful and strange of mediums (porcelain, crystals, flush valve seals, taxidermic eyes) with a terrifying exquisiteness.

“I try to examine what’s behind the more unpleasant parts of life,” he continues. “I want to make elegance out of something wicked.”

Patty Healy McMeans, whose white-on-white drawings upon satin canvas, subtle beaded pearl stitching, and screen-printing ink images suggest a quietly blinding world, hopes to achieve similar reactions of understanding. “Much of my work operates from a place of phenomena, that ‘a-ha!’ moment,” she muses. “It’s meant as a slow discovery.”

Eric Carroll, both a photography student and teacher at the university, started creating the work on display through his research in the technological history of the photographic industry.

“I like to start out with ‘real’ three-dimensional experiences, compress them with photography, and then bring them back to 3D through various studio practices, as a way to get to more universal feelings of loss, change, nostalgia, and obsolescence,” he says.

Carroll’s massive “One Year of Taking Pictures—or A Proposed Alternative to the Recent Scrapbooking Craze” is framed by two walls lined with thousands of photographs scooped out of the dumpsters of one-hour photo shops in the last year. The photographic identities are dispelled by 35 mm holes driven through their centers, and in the center of his display are poles speared with stacks of more photos categorized by Landscape, Weddings, Travel, Holidays, and so forth.

“Some people think this is a violent act, but I think photography can be that way,” Carroll says. “It’s all about interpretation.”

Bridges agrees wholeheartedly. “I feel the point of the artist, of myself and the other people here at the gallery, is to help others imagine what we dream.”

The Katherine E. Nash Gallery presents five Master of Fine Arts exhibitions in a show that opens March 28 and runs through April 20, 2006. All events at the Nash are free and open to the general public.