WLCMBCK

This year's fall show featured second year MFAs, faculty, and staff of Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. The show closed recently and here are some highlights:








Alan Prazniak
Dream Girl
oil on puzzle and earrings

Opening the show and greeting us cheerfully at the door is Alan Prazniak's sculpture made from oil paint on stacked puzzles and earrings. Dream Girl is a sparkling hostess free of corporeal burdens. She is covered in mostly golden yellow oil paint with other vibrant blues and reds sprinkled allover, and retains the warmth of a strapping Cairo Sphinx. Prazniak allows the protector of tombs a flamboyant expression. Dream Girl reminds us that strength and power are in fact female characteristics. Not even Excessive Glamour can weigh her down.

Eileen Behnke

...on the grass, 2010
oil on canvas

On the left wall of the main room we are immediately attracted to six lounging figures. Eileen Behnke's painting …on the grass is a human scale. The figures in their lively vibrancy have a way of screaming without shouting for us to get on the grass with them. Brilliantly inviting us for a day of leisure and laughter. We stand in the place of a picnicking friend, standing for a stretch. Cell phones and cigarettes strewn subtly is a painting of now and it is real and fun. Behnke's utopia is immediately accessible.

Julie Langsam
Fuller Landscape/ Dymaxion Dwelling Machine/ Whicita House/ Reinhardt Pink, 2007
oil on panel
24x24"

To the right of "...on the grass" is Julie Langsam's juxtaposing, dystopic landscape. Fuller Landscape/Dymaxion Dwelling Machine/Wichita House/Reinhardt Pink, 2007 is at a much smaller scale (24 x 24) with a rigid surface (oil on panel). With a museum on display, we are made to question the alienating effect of placing something so far away from its neighbors. Post-modern architecture is echoed in the post-modern construction of the panel, the surface floats over what is called in gallery terms, a reveal. The murky grey sky looms over a flat abstract digitalesque smaller half of the painting, denying an 'underground'. There is only surface.

Wendy White
CNC, 2010
Acrylic on canvas
37.5"x43"

On the opposite wall behind us is Wendy White's painting titled CNC. The canvas's weave is visible through the thin airbrushed surface in White's painting. Colors gracefully gradient into one another. CNC denotes a title that is possibly an abbreviation for something, a name? An acronym? Here is a tornado of an image; airbrushed marks evoke quick futuristic thoughts. Streamline text are regimental however they are full of play, flexible in meaning and interpretation.

Erin Dunn
Whoops, 2010
Mixed media
dimensions variable

To the first room on the right is Erin Dunn's piece titled "Whoops". Paintings full of fluidity rest on and against a marred, scuffed pedestal. They are full of sparkle, color and varying texture. Paintings for Dunn are tactile objects and that's what we like to feel with our eyes. We are material girls living in a material world. The pedestal marks are anything but distracting, they emphasize its own materiality. Just like the body that is scarred, it is still a body and is still beautiful. Its past experiences through time and space are not hidden from us: the evidence is available and we love it!