As the semester winds down, nine Miami University graduate students are preparing for their thesis art shows in order to graduate and enter the job market.
The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program within the department of art is a two to three year series of classes, critiques, teaching and of course, creating art.
The nine students are finishing up work not only on their art pieces but also how they plan on displaying their work, designing their show cards and wrapping up their classes.
Ann Taulbee, Hiestand Galleries director since 2001, works together with the graduate students on the groundwork for their show and throughout their time at Miami.
"I help them think and re-think the layout of their show so that it is a knock out," Taulbee said. "It's rewarding to be a part of their discovery and help them intellectually and visually."
dele jegede, chair of Miami's art department, said the graduate program is very selective and Miami is recognized as being among the top 100 MFA programs nationwide.
jegede said he has nothing but praise for the group of nine graduating at the end of spring semester.
"They are a phenomenal, excellent group," he said. "They are quite inventive, and they are all stylistically different."
jegede said he wished they would all stay for another two years but knows they are all ready to graduate and enter the art world.
Culture critics
Some of the graduate students' work delves into themes and topics of politics, history, religion, drugs and parenting.
Josh Foy, ceramics graduate student, tackles the large topic of politics in his work. By focusing on significant issues like the Iraq war and how it is underscored and buried beneath insignificant topics like "Paris Hilton and which dog Barack Obama is going to get," Foy said he hopes that by shaking up his audience's ideas and thoughts they will question their own notions of politics.
"I'm trying to bring the issues of our generation to the forefront and show that U.S. political events have adverse affects," Foy said.
Foy's large-scale pieces each take around a month and a half to complete, and he said he aims to have seven pieces in his show titled "Side Effects May Include."
Alan Pocaro, printmaking graduate student, is fascinated with the past and historical events. Pocaro said he tries to come to terms with the past and discover his relationship with it.
"As a species we have created big problems for ourselves and as we try to solve them our solutions cause more problems," Pocaro said. "I'm just trying to understand that."
While nothing is off-limits, Pocaro said he tries to anchor his work around certain events, like World War II and 9/11, as well as thinking about Marxism and capitalism.
"I think about how economically unbridled our belief is in the marketplace and capitalism," Pocaro said. "Cash is our new god, but we're finding out that it was a false god."
Pocaro said he hopes to create an experience and feeling that is as close a mimic of his own feelings on history and events as he can make it through expressing abstract thoughts visually instead of just verbally. His show titled "Light Passes Through It" will be a compilation of large installations sprinkled with smaller tubular pieces. Pocaro said he doesn't consider his pieces as separate works, but as something that comes together to form a collective work.
In his work, Brandon Noblet, sculpture graduate student, said he tries to shine light on the current socialization of today's children and the subtle lessons children learn from their toys. Noblet said through toys such as the seesaw, children learn about hierarchy and prestige by exuding dominance and control over their lighter counterpart.
"These are social structures that we don't teach children, but they automatically pull these ideals together," Noblet said.
Noblet said he also takes note of how society protects children more than in the past.
"Children today are denied natural rites of passage like scraping your knee and taking risks," Noblet said. "Even cartoons and toys aren't as aggressive as they used to be. I used to play with G.I. Joes and ride on the merry-go-round."
The combination of safeguarding children and letting them learn important lessons from toys, Noblet said, has given way to a new generation of children who have weaker social skills and a lower tolerance for pain or feelings of isolation because the children haven't been able to take risks.
He hopes to have around 10 pieces in his show titled "Playing for Keeps," each of which takes about two weeks to two months to finish.
Casey Vogt, painting graduate student, said he uses themes of religion and big business corporations in his work. For Vogt, the "huge boom" in the use of pharmaceuticals has replaced God.
"People used to talk to God and follow organized religion when they had problems," Vogt said. "Now they pop pills to get level and neither one is smart."
A series of three paintings in Vogt's show, titled "Meaning and Nothingness," is called "Three Wise Men." Vogt said the new wise men are Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil.
Vogt refers to his work as mysterious, cheeky and trippy and the colorful juxtaposition of images is what Vogt calls "visually weird." Vogt's show will consist of more than 13 works, with each piece taking about two weeks to complete.
In the middle
A few of the art students take on subjects that relate to both societal and personal views.
Andrew Dailey, painting graduate student, said he focuses on human behavior and its relation to money and greed.
"I depict the interface between man and machine," Dailey said. "People will do a lot of dumb things for money, and my work shows that witty, ridiculous behavior."
Dailey said his work is inspired by 1930s illustrator and cartoonist Rube Goldberg who portrayed complicated contraptions carrying out simple functions.
Dailey's work is labor intensive and follows strict procedure. He builds all of the machines seen is his 6-foot paintings. After he builds the machines, Dailey photographs both himself and other graduate students using the machines and interacting with them. He paints his canvases from the photographs.
In his show titled "Decision and Consequence," Dailey said he plans to have more than 10 large paintings, each of which takes about two months to complete.
Dailey said society increasingly interacts through technology, computers and cell phones rather than face-to-face contact and he hopes his audience will take away that social comment on communication and technology.
Dailey's work has been recognized nationally when one of his paintings was accepted into a painting competition at the Evansville Museum of Art, History and Science in Indiana. Dailey won the Purchase Award, and the piece has become
a part of the museum's permanent collection. Dailey attributes his success to the support from his wife Kelly.
Derek Reeverts, ceramics graduate student, also addresses the absurdities of life in his work.
"The flaws and foibles of humans are the most distinctive elements of who we are," Reeverts said.
Reeverts uses miniature ceramic sculptures as his means for expression. In his show titled "A Precarious Repose," Reeverts said he hopes his audience will get a sense for the drama and satire he uses to express the quirks in the world and will understand the metaphors he is using.
Reeverts uses several well-known proverbs and archetypes in his work to help express his questions to the audience. Among these well-known sayings are "burying the hatchet" and "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
When Reeverts creates his pieces, which stand about 1 foot high, he said he goes through three different sketches before choosing one and refining it. He starts with the sculpting phase, which is followed by the surfacing, or painting, of the piece. An average piece for Reeverts takes around two and a half weeks to complete.
Reeverts said his work has come full-circle during his time at Miami.
"I explored different scale shifts and vastly refined my work," he said. "I have learned to develop good context for my work and strongly honed my content."
Charlie Buckley, painting graduate student, mixes the depiction of time and space in his work. His show, titled "Chronogeography," merges the ideas of calendars and maps. Buckley said he likes cataloging time by making it into static, non-moving layers.
Buckley's pieces consist of many layers using screen-printing, paint, carved plastic and wax, in addition to autobiographical images of his hometown in Mississippi and his travels to Oxford.
Buckley's show will also have a 27-foot painting indexing the narrative of his 27 years of life. The piece took six weeks to complete.
Buckley said through his two years at Miami, he has learned how to merge his two thought processes for art-painting strict representational images and having abstract collages.
Looking inward
While many students spend time trying to make sense of the world around them, some focus on externalizing the internal.
Felix Villarreal, printmaking graduate student, is autobiographical in his prints. Mixing the use of realistic and abstract images of his father, Villarreal said he works through his feelings about his father and his father's illness. By mixing these two types of images, Villarreal said he can explore different forms and values full of nuance.
Villarreal mixes layers of ink to depict geographical images of places his father has lived, grids representing Western medicine and its seemingly deteriorating status, as well as dosages of prescriptions all spread across portraits of his father.
Villarreal said he knows his show titled "Prisoner" doesn't present a direct, linear answer to the viewer but hopes one can see the subject matter and context are very personal.
"In other prints from artists there's a sincere authentic element from the hand of the artist missing," Villarreal said. "There's a lot of personal information coded into my work."
Meredith Adamisin, also a printmaking graduate student, said she too uses personal images in her work, so personal in fact that they come off of her own body. Adamisin uses ink monotypes and large etchings to express her feelings on body dysmorphia and the conflict between psychology and the physical figure. She said this relationship stemmed from her studies of art and psychology while an undergraduate. Ever since, the two subjects have been "married together," Adamisin said.
Adamisin uses life-size figures that are cut and obscured in some way to reflect a psychological feeling. Adamisin said she mostly uses her body out of familiarity and the right she has to it. She has been working with this topic of the human form for a number of years and said her work has become more explicit.
"I used to use soft forms with the figure, but now I'm more aggressive and disturbing with it but I still find a way to make them redeemable," Adamisin said.
Adamisin's show titled "False Bodies and Phantom Limbs" will exhibit nearly 40 different works of various sizes.
Students teaching students
All graduate students hold duties within their departments.
Whether it be monitoring studios and helping students, working as teacher's assistants or teaching their own classes, the graduate students interact often with Miami's undergraduate students. jegede said he highly values the rapport between graduates and undergraduates.
"It is really a healthy and productive relationship," jegede said. "Junior and senior undergraduates look at the graduate students to see what they might be like two to three years down the road."
Sam Hitchman, senior ceramics and metal major, agreed with jegede and added having the option of talking to someone with technological knowledge and experience, who is close to his age, offers more variety than just professors.
"It is great to see many artists who are committed and have multiple aspects on the field," Hitchman said. "They take on so many different avenues of exploration."
Adamisin said having an assistantship that lets her work with students helped her better integrate into the program.
"By interacting with students on the creative process it feeds and influences your own ideas," Adamisin said.
Dailey said he loves interacting with students who are interested in painting and drawing.
"The students are very enthusiastic about the same things as me," Dailey said. "I like to help the students understand on a more intuitive level now."
Camaraderie or competition?
The graduate students also teach each other. Noblet said he loves being able to bounce his ideas off other graduate students and draw from them.
"I've learned how to be more diverse and take my work in different directions that I otherwise wouldn't have thought of," Noblet said.
Dailey added the other graduate students have been very influential for him.
Foy agreed and said the good community of graduate students at Miami was a refreshing change for him.
Villarreal, the oldest of the graduate students, said he had a large adjustment to make from a professional atmosphere to an academic environment, as he was a trained printmaker before coming to graduate school.
"In this graduate program, content is stressed a lot, and I have vastly improved in that area,"
Villarreal said. "When I came here (two and half years ago) my work was all about process only, but now it's about the image too."
Adamisin said her colleagues have helped form a great working environment.
"It's competitive, but in a good-natured way," she said. "Everyone holds everyone else accountable for what they can do, in the most professional way."
Buckley said his time at Miami hasn't always been easy.
"It has been some of the best and worst times of my life," he said. "It's been so stressful but also very rewarding, and I've made some of my best friends here."
Next steps
While every graduate said they hope to live as an artist making their work after graduation, they all admitted it's easier said than done, especially given the tough economy. Some students said they would prefer becoming a professor, while others will be glad to be done with the teaching aspect of graduate school.
Reeverts said he is nervous about graduating because of the difficulty of finding a job, yet he also feels prepared because of the quality of the degree he will receive from Miami.
"The MFA degree is one in which you have to be motivated to succeed," Reeverts said. "This department of art does prepare you to have the motivation and skills set necessary."
jegede said he has high expectations for this year's group of graduates.
"We've produced graduates that are eminently qualified to contribute to the 21st century global community," he said. "Some will become established artists and professors, and Miami thrives on that. It's better for us."
jegede said the MFA degree is a terminal degree for the area of study that is on par with a doctorate, according to the
National Association of Schools of Art and Design. He added he foresees some of these artists "becoming quotable" instead of quoting others.
