In a perfect world, college graduation would alert companies from a chosen area of interest to take notice. For most students this is only a dream, but for UCLA graduate students earning their master of fine arts degree, it is a reality.
Starting Thursday in the New Wight Gallery of the Broad Art Center, four graduating art students will have the opportunity to showcase their work. This exhibition will be the first of four between now and May 8 in which each art graduate student will be able to present work to the art community at large for the span of a week.
In this particular exhibition, the artists showing their work are Claire Baker, Benjamin Britton, Michelle Dizon and John Kilduff.
The MFA program at UCLA has about 40 students altogether, in media including sculpture, painting, photography and interdisciplinary studio, incorporating more than one. While students enter the school with a specialty in a specific style, they spend two to three years in the studio, experimenting with different media and perfecting their trade.
“This show kind of represents the culmination of that really hands-on work over the last however many years we’ve been here,” Baker said.
“While there are five disciplines in the (graduate) program, this show in particular has three painters and one more-theoretical and video-based artist in the interdisciplinary studio program. So that’s kind of distinctive because normally it’s more mixed up with photography and sculpture and whatnot.”
Each artist will have a whole room in the New Wight Gallery to showcase his work, and the artists are presenting their work in a variety of different methods.
Dizon has been working on her project for two and a half years.
“People work very differently. Some people have gotten some idea that they’re working through on a lot of different pieces, but mine has kind of all accumulated into one large project,” Dizon said.
Dizon’s piece will be a three-channel video installation, which involves three DVD players set simultaneously to the same soundtrack. There is also a narrator who leads the film through its lens of loss and displacement.
“The film revolves around a kind of absence, and the absence in the film is that the narrator can’t recall the 1992 revolt that happened in Los Angeles. That was what inspired the piece for me. Basically I’m trying to deal with the history of the space and figure out how it is that the resonance of the 1992 rebellion in Los Angeles continues,” she said.
For Baker, a painter, her work for the exhibit dates back only to August, when she spent time in a small village in Mexico.
“I have kind of two parts to my practice. One part is that I work plain air, which means that I paint directly on site. I’m a landscape painter. And then I bring that home into the studio and then I extract more abstract paintings that have more to do with color and on a larger scale which are made through extensive time in the studio,” Baker said.
“So I spent six weeks painting plain air and then I spent the last six months working on the four paintings that are going to be in the show.”
While many of the graduating art students have had work shown in galleries before, they consider this exhibition as not only the culmination of their work in the MFA program but also an entrance into the contemporary art world.
Art professor and chair of the department Russell Ferguson considers these students to be professional artists and thus does not consider this exhibition to be an introduction.
“It is less a debut for the artists than a transition. The exhibition marks the conclusion of their formal studies and thus on one level their entry into a broader art world,” Ferguson said.