PAFA's 113th Annual Student Exhibition

The intrusion of my personal history in viewing the exhibition is compounded by the fact that my husband, Gary Weisman, has been a teacher of figurative sculpture at PAFA for the past 25 years.

I come to the current ASE with baggage, yet I have little memory of what I felt about the 1988 or 1989 ASE shows and hardly remember the work. I recall that someone’s art fell off the wall, and this was a major catastrophe. Would “the fall” be considered a disruption today, or would it be incorporated as work of the art?

I do know that the pressure to account for a successful future is more demanding now than when I was a student. When I was at PAFA, many students were like me. I was a young adult with a history to shed because the professional goals I imagined for myself through graduate school were not mine. I had no intention of placing the demands of career goals in art upon myself. I recognized the beauty in the “throwaway job” that allowed the time and space necessary for creativity. Career goals have the potential to shackle creativity.

I am not sure if the freedom to disregard career goals is granted to current students — college costs too much money, the students are younger, and parents may have more input expecting a return on the investment.

However, I think the PAFA faculty continues to work in helping the student recognize that art, as a process of creativity, cannot be produced on command and does not have to be manufactured for consumption. This recognition is evident in the 113th exhibition, which, unlike 25 years ago, allows for greater freedom in the mediums explored by students and how those mediums are used.

The power of obsession

The 113th exhibition presents itself as a work in process; some work is polished, while other works are still in the rough. Art becomes a point in that process presenting itself as beauty marks, hiccups, exclamations; mere moments of punctuations.

In this exhibition, along with traditional works of drawing, painting, and sculpture, are Olivia Wilmerding’s drawing on the museum wall using the medium of blue tape, Alicia Finger’s cut-paper sculpture, Alexandria Douziech’s inflated plastic sculpture, and various assemblages, all giving art the freedom not to survive beyond the exhibition.

Consequently, freedom that has been lost is found in other ways. Change finds equilibrium, creativity continues, and nostalgia is a waste of time.

One such newly found freedom is evident in the work of Maxwell Torn’s large five-panel landscape — a vital work of painting that apparently Torn will continue to work upon during the exhibition time. I don’t know when the ASE abandoned the rule that only totally dried and apparently completed works could be exhibited. It would be very exciting if every work of art had the opportunity to be transformed in the process of the exhibition, or not, depending upon the creative desires of the artist.

There is work strong in craft, presentation, and, my favorite, obsession.

Anna Hodges’s paintings suggest strong drawing and painting foundations reinterpreted in a personal style, allowing her to hyper-focus upon certain areas and abandon these concerns elsewhere; developing the paintings with masterly compositional skills. The paintings present a rich visual world that Hodges accompanies with typed pages of what seemed to be a novel. I was happy that reading the “novel” was not important for experiencing the work. I do appreciate the intensity of presenting too-many-words-to-read-that-is-not-required suggesting another layer of obsession.

Brendan Keen’s large wood and steel sculpture, appearing as a honeycomb structure supported by bronze poles, is another work of discipline, intensity, and obsession. Although it is certainly complete, I see it as a work in progress wanting to find a home in nature rather than reduced to a corporate decoration for a sterile lobby. In an arboretum or woods with nature lending its elements, the sculpture can be given the freedom to evolve as it will.

Putting it all together

Assemblages were not a part of the exhibition 25 years ago, but such works have found a strong place in the current exhibition. I don’t have much experience with assemblages, having only created one as an undergraduate student when I was given the opportunity to create an exhibition for the presidential boardroom of the small liberal arts college I attended. I constructed an exhibition of objects I found on walks to the college library: roadkill, petrified frogs, sticks, broken glass, stones, whatever. This was before assemblages became part of every liberal college art department. The school was shocked, and I was considered disrespectful.

When assemblages were first developed, they conveyed a sense of respect/disrespect and challenged what was traditionally held in esteem by substituting found objects the artists held in esteem.

However, assemblages no longer present this challenge, and found objects are now readily accepted. Assemblages must search for a more complex experience to be considered interesting. They demand the same understanding as any other work of art — composition, design, articulation, and color harmony. Assemblage artists might benefit from that old-fashioned discipline of the still life painting, where both functional and dysfunctional homeostasis of disparate objects is explored.

Alice Palic’s presentation of dresses suggests a blending of sculpture and assemblage. Two dresses comprise most of her work; both seem to be confronted with the issue of gravity. One white dress, reminiscent of Whistler’s painting, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, hangs from the ceiling. The dress's skirt seems to have mutated in length, reaching almost to the ground as if in conflict with gravity. The other dress seems to have given up the fight against gravity: Its circular skirt clings to the floor. There is a sense of interiority in these pieces, giving authority. This interiority may be the result that the pieces were not exactly found objects but mostly sewn by the artist, or at least rearticulated. In this dress-as-art, the artist discovers the mysterious direction of the thread. Thread becomes synonymous with the drawn line, and this single line morphs into complex form, losing itself in that form.

The 113th exhibition presents many issues for discussion. There is the issue of Inga Kimberly Brown’s inevitable political work as a minority black student in a white institution, raising the question of how does the art of black artists extend beyond the labeling and showing of African-American art brought out by white institutions for the month of February. Will blackness ever penetrate the skin of its white art community and be allowed to really invade the space of the viewer — which is necessary for any art?

There is the issue of photography as seen in the MFA exhibition on the second floor — a floor I have had to ignore in this small review, but definitely worthy of review. How will PAFA incorporate technology into its curriculum? PAFA would be in a unique position if photography can be seen as a development dependent upon its tradition. I can only suspect that a photographer trained in the tradition of PAFA — observation of life through drawing and painting — occupies a very strong place.

PAFA’s strength has been and continues to be the requirement that artists learn through observation of the visual world; that this observation is as engaged observation infused with meaning that exists without being contrived; that this observation is the basis of creative knowing; and when invention takes form, it emerges from this foundation. That is what I learned as a PAFA student and what I continue to learn from PAFA students.

For more of Treacy Ziegler's thoughts on the making of artists, click here.