MASTER THE ART In Rotation 18 | Art of the State 19 | Foodfinds 22 | Fi¬m 24
A CURRENT ART EXHIBITION EXPLORES THE DIVERSITY OF WORK CREATED BY GRADUATES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA RENO’S MFA PROGRAM
PHOTOS/AMY BECK
Peter Whittenberger and Kim Musser stand before their work (his video is on the left, her paintings on the right) in the Common Ground art exhibit.
BY Brad Bynum bradb@newsreview.com
For a show called
Common Fate, the current exhibition in the Truckee Meadows Community College Main Art Gallery is surprisingly diverse. The artworks seem to have more in contrast than in common with one another. There’s a rugged, outdoorsy assemblage sculpture; a collection of unusual, elegant book designs; and a big, bright, colorful video loaded with pop culture images. There are two painters in the show, but one paints small, carefully rendered oil portraits and the other paints large, colorful acrylic abstractions— one of which is based on a video game character. What the six contrasting artists in the exhibition have in common is that they’re all graduates of the University 16
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MARCH 15, 2012
of Nevada, Reno’s Master of Fine Arts program. It’s a small, young program, first launched in 2006. The participating artists in the exhibition constitute six of its seven graduates. “We all are very diverse,” says Peter Whittenberger, the artist responsible for the colorful video. “We come from different places artistically and around the states.” “I think it’s refreshing to see the variety of work in a show like this,” says Jeff Erickson, the outdoorsy sculptor. In addition to the works by Erickson and Whittenberger, there are a pair of travelogue-like videos by Jeremy Stern, paintings by Ahren Hertel (the oil portraitist) and Kim Musser (the acrylic abstractionist), and book arts by Katy Govan. The TMCC gallery is large enough that most of the pieces seem to exist in their own individual spaces. “I like that it’s a sparse show,” says Tamara Scronce, who curated the show. She’s a sculpture professor at UNR and chair of the MFA program. “That allows the work to have
its own autonomy and let that diversity play off each other.” The possible exception to this principle of autonomy is Whittenberger’s video, “Simple #1,5,6,8,” which, by virtue of being large, colorful and constantly changing, tends to attract the eye before the rest of the work. It’s a video of a fluttering hand which appears to pet, as one would a dog, a variety of animals, political figures, athletes, musicians, objects, advertising mascots, cartoon characters, and just about any other conceivable category of thing. It’s bizarre, hypnotic and funny. “Originally my idea was a piece about how we interact with the world physically with our hands,” says Whittenberger. “Originally, it was going to be a video of me petting different things, and I decided that of course I didn’t need to be in the video. That’s why I went the animation route. As I started to gather more and more subject matters, I decided that they needed to be random. It was either going to be from one genre or one specific aspect of the world, you know,
sports or politics, or it needed to be a little bit of everything. So I went with the little bit of everything route. I think there’s around 172 different subjects.” Erickson’s piece, “Exalted in Might Most Merciful,” is a material-oriented assemblage that brings together stones, cast aluminum, mirrors, and, almost hidden in the piece, a rabbit tail, something delicate hidden in the sturdy materials. Erickson describes it as an artifact of some chance encounter, possibly with a coyote. “Coyotes leave the tail, just the tail, cottontail rabbit tails just kind of blowing in the wind,” says Erickson. “I find them perfectly nipped off. And I think about what occurs—obviously something happened—and it’s the fact of that encounter that I’m interested in.” Kim Musser has two paintings in the exhibition. One is a non-representational exploration of color. The second is an abstracted representation of the character Master Chief from the Halo video game series. “I wanted to do something representational that was still along my interests and still in my style—my
abstract-y, graphic, bold colors-andlines style,” says Musser. “I love playing video games, and Halo is one of my very favorite video games.” Interestingly, though Master Chief is usually depicted with the more detailed, realistic graphics of contemporary video games, Musser’s approach transformed him to flat blocks of colors almost reminiscent of the 8-bit era. “I wanted to abstract him,” says Musser. “I wanted it to be that when people saw it, they’d go, oh that’s a Kim painting—but wait, that’s Master Chief! You know, kind of see him as the second thought. Like, that’s a colorful painting, but wait, there’s a figure in there. I wanted him to be sort of hidden.”
MAKING THE GRAD “What I got excited about is that they are all still making artwork,” says Scronce, of the program’s graduates, and the impetus of the exhibition. “They are all still pursuing their careers as practicing artists and most
