It might seem like fairs are currently dominating the New York art scene, but further out in town, Columbia University’s 30 MFA graduate students showcase their thesis work in a thoughtful exhibition that offers a pause welcome relative to trade exhibitions. The unraveling and explosion of time, space and matter, curated by Jasmine Wahi and running through May 21, takes up two floors at the school’s Lenfest Center for the Arts and involves more than just paintings hung side-by-side or artwork grouped into arbitrary categories. Instead, the exhibition compiles incredibly disparate works in a web of immersive gallery spaces, all of which speak in one way or another to the impossible theme of the exhibition. What does “the unraveling and explosion of time, space and matter” mean?
Garrett Low’s prints, watercolors and linoleum-printed wallpapers address the show’s wordy title from the first entry. Facing the gallery doors, the installation is an obsessive and pseudo-mathematical dissection of Western art and the notion of time featuring a subway turnstile and the imposing architecture of the famous hall of Grand Central Station. Now, artists are largely shedding this canonical imagery, concocting their thesis presentations from non-traditional objects and personal memories.
One thing that stands out from the show is a handful of performers’ exploration of fear as a tool to convey deeper meaning. Upstairs, Anna Ting Möller’s two-part installation features severed limbs hanging from the dark space ceiling and a 10-minute video loop. The film mixes personal and landscape images taken in China (Möller is Chinese and Swedish). The scenes – glimpses of a water bottle on a table, the facade of a building, a crowded street, a serene river and flailing hands – evoke a racing memory. In front of the video, Möller’s sculptural works are made in part using kombucha culture. The probiotic is made from tea and sugar, two engines of imperialism, and Möller describes his use of the material as a reflection on colonial histories.
Two floors down, Alison Nguyen summoned a gruesome split car filled with dirt. A disturbing film that follows the lives of three women programmed by artificial intelligence whose memories have been erased, interspersed with references to the Vietnam War, plays on three nearby screens. In one scene, the women sit in the back of a car with a dead man lying in a pile of dirt at their feet.
Other works are more playful. “Wayward Bridge, Westward Sun” from Merry Sun (2023) features three angled platforms with steel pipes lined along their sides. The pipes play whimsical notes as the viewer crosses the undulating bridges.
Another stunning presentation incorporating sound is the multi-part installation by Paul Rho Tide (2023), which combines analog photography and moon jars, a traditional Korean ceramic. Speakers inside the jars play fast singular notes — recordings of Rho hitting ceramic bells — on a 10-minute loop. Pings move from one paper pot to another and never ring at the same time. The intervals between notes are too long to capture a pattern, transforming the ethereal work into another somewhat unsettling installation.
I met Rho near her installation, setting up her camera to document the exhibit for her classmates. Creating Tide, Rho told me, he wondered how he could “make photography something else”. The project began with the artist throwing moon pots on a potter’s wheel, then wrapping them in mulberry paper printed with photographs from Korea, where he grew up. Rho felt that the material aspect of the job was done, so he added a performance element in which he strikes two bells as he knocks over the paper pots while wearing traditional Korean clothing. hanbok attire (the bells, dress, and a short video of the performance are displayed near the paper pots).
“At the end of the day, I can’t play 24/7, so it has to come in the form of a setup,” Rho said. With the help of a friend, he recorded the sound of the bells and played them inside the moon jars.
The Columbia MFA exhibit also includes a handful of exquisite paintings, some contemplating collective histories and others relaying deeply personal moments. Conor Dowdle’s “Duo Divorce Club” (2022) depicts a bar in Brooklyn. Dowdle, who drew on location, told me that the figures sitting on the bar stools vaguely resembled real people. The bar looks almost carnival-like, with its yellow hues and ceiling painted with the sunburst pattern of a circus tent. The figures themselves also seem transient, vaguely delineated and blurry as if in motion.
Other works are more abstract. Levi Nelson, an artist from the Lil’wat Nation in British Columbia, Canada, designed a series of oil paintings incorporating indigenous design elements, including the Pacific Northwest. shape line and the Coast Salish carving style. In his artist statement, Nelson explains that he chose the European tradition of oil painting as a way to explore what it means to be an artist with an identity that has been “interrupted, influenced, shattered, then reconstituted”. on both sides. ”
On the ground floor, Li Wang’s paintings show a single nude subject in various domestic spaces bathed in vibrant lighting. Kat Lowish has also created a series of paintings depicting interiors. They are mostly quiet and sometimes surreal, wondering what happens in our most intimate surroundings when no one is around to watch them. Kevin Cobb’s series of oddly shaped oil paintings play with perspective and self-perception, stacking multiple realities of vision into single works and depicting the artist’s point of view as he physically creates. pieces of art.
Perhaps thanks to the meticulous organization of Jasmine Wahi, who founded the local non-profit arts project Project for Empty Space, each of the 30 presentations transports the viewer to wildly different places while remaining somewhat cohesive. What brings them together might be the chilling echoes of video loops filling the galleries, giving even the lightest works the sense that time, space and matter are indeed “unraveling and exploding”.
