Fraught with Meaning: The Challenge to a Modern Art Observer

The Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition provides a glimpse at widely varied modern art produced by a handful of new experts in the art world. The media ranges from oil painting to digital painting to video and audio. This myriad of materials used in the art provides breadth to the exhibit and provides a well-rounded snapshot of how art is being created today. The subject matter, which cannot be simply classified as still life or portrait, provides a grueling experience for the observer to decipher the meaning of the pieces. Further, the thesis aspect of this exhibition begs the question: did these up-and-coming artists produce successful works of art?

Tobias Walther offers a strange, stomach-churning venture around Pullman in his piece Sailor (2009). He places two black and white video loops next to one another, and the loops show similar images of the Washington State University campus and the surrounding rolling wheat fields. While the loops are timed differently, there are critical points of overlap where the same image appears concurrently. The significant length of the loops and the dramatic sound effects make this piece successful and captivate the audience. The stark, desolate black and white camera shots and the sounds, such as heavy breathing and crunching wheat, are reminiscent of an eerie Alfred Hitchcock mystery. His title could indicate a lonely, arduous journey like that faced by a sailor a long time ago. There is a constant sense of searching, bewilderment, and uncertainty of what is coming next in this piece. Walther’s work keeps the senses on edge and the mind busy trying to piece together what is happening.

Heather McGeachy took a rather novel approach to her pieces with the use of digital painting. This intriguing media appears to consist of a digitally composed image printed on clear plastic sheets and encased in plexiglas. The more abstract pieces that combine an exploration of composition and color are the most successful. The piece Tyria (2008) reveals an abstract Southwestern landscape with incredible depth even though the image floats, suspended away from the wall. It has a water color quality, since the colors are transparent. It invites the viewer to make sense of the organic shapes and absence of solid lines. In contrast, the piece Dunkoh (2008) is a triptych depicting cartoon-like science fiction scenes. The first and third images are of the same robot with differing colors, and the center image is of a futuristic building. This composition makes the three images seem disconnected, and the work would appear more coherent if the center image was, for instance, the robot again with still different colors. This piece would find a better place at a sci-fi convention than an art gallery. However, the variety of McGeachy’s pieces provides a rounded portfolio of work that demonstrates exploration of the medium of digital painting, such as overlapping colors and layers of sheets with color and black lines.

This exhibition suggests that the current art world is complex, wide and varying. There is significant and broad exploration of media, which is most apparent. A majority of these pieces can really only be exhibited and critically appreciated in a museum setting, such as the installation or mixed media pieces. These works do not easily give up their meaning. Their complexity or simplicity or pure strangeness wrestles with the observer and puts up a fight against understanding and reason. There seems to be a growing distinction between artwork for exhibits in museums and that for private ownership. Privately owned works can be pleasing pictures that hang on the wall or small sculptures; whereas, art intended for a museum setting is obscure with meaning. It seems there is a rift between simply aesthetically pleasing art and the art produced by true experts in their field, when long ago they used to be one and the same.