California College of Art (CCA) MFA Degree Show Round-up
San Francisco, CA
8 – 17 May 2008

by Tonya Warner

The CCA degree show this year was decidedly a mixed bag. Here is my list of the best of the bunch:

Jessica Skloven
Skloven works in large scale C-prints, using composition and lighting effects to create beautifully abstracted visions of mundane scenes. Branches appear out of blank whiteness, a lawn chair is barely visible through a green haze; some images feature very little that is recognizable, just washes of color and the allusion of movement. The effect is destabilizing – she uses visual and technical tricks of color photography to create something more akin to expressionist painting, covering each scene with a layer of emotion.

Adrianne Fernandez
Fernandez’s “Alternative Album” is one of the more cohesive offerings in this show. Drawing from both documentary and the current critical interest in the snapshot, she creates an alternative family narrative that is unsettling, personal, and entirely fictional. Embedded in the falseness of this narrative can be found traces of identity politics and the trials of situating the self within civil society. She places herself and her daughter at the center of this story, creating images that in their aesthetic presentation of the mundane recall Nan Goldin.

Colleen Sanders
Sanders exhibits two large gouache paintings, both of which are painted with such controlled skill and attention to detail, it is easy to get lost in staring up close at the delicacy of strands of hair or shell fragments. However, when one steps back, this seemingly random collection of knotted hair and shells or of cloth, rocks and pins come together to form the outlines of a classical figure, and pieta, respectively. She alludes to art historical forms in a style that is distinctly contemporary. Sanders’s attention to surface and material would be notable enough on their own, however, the meta composition of these elements throw their use into question.

Taha Belal
Belal’s series deals specifically with newspapers – a dying although still symbolic medium. He exhibits various methods of addressing a news sheet according to its formal and ideological properties. A copy of the New York Times has had its text replaced with Arabic, a sheet from the Financial Times has been rubbed clean, and one now nameless publication has had all its text lines cut out. It is both a mental and visual exercise, drawing upon a contemporary disconnect between cultures as well as a current a distrust of the mass media.

http://sites.cca.edu/gradthesisevents/index.html
http://jessicaskloven.com/home.html
http://www.colleensanders.com/index.html
http://www.tahabelal.com/

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