Mills MFA Degree Show
Mills College Art Museum
Oakland, CA
4 May – 1 June 2008

by Tonya Warner

Mills College, a small private liberal arts school, is known for its emphasis on theory-based practice. This is evident in this year’s MFA graduate show, where many of the artists contributed works that were not only beautiful but also quite clever. Below is a listing of the highlights:

Reiko Kubota
Kubota’s work centers around experiential video installations. In one room plays a video of what looks like Styrofoam balls floating into and out of focus. Their mesmerizing abstracted forms seem to explore the beauty of chance. Upon turning to exit this space, one discovers a small rectangular screen, close to the floor, playing a video of feet walking back and forth. It is a very simple gesture, but well sited. Kubota also invites us to lay down on pillows on the floor and watch footage of swimmers overhead. The effect is quite meditative. With simple elements, she manages to manipulate our experience of space and create visual poetry.

Joanne Hashitani
Hashitani’s works, hidden away in their own little room, came as a pleasant surprise – delicate pieces of thread and tape or acrylic paint floating off the wall. With each piece, much care was put into modeling the light so that the shadows cast upon the wall become an integral element to the composition. With their gridded structures, and especially a piece that incorporated an entire season of baseball scores, these works come across as a form of analogue data visualization.

Ethan Worden
Worden’s works play with the idea of scale – he makes intricate, finely detailed models that are then blown up into large color photographs. He has done this with both a billboard sign’s support structures as well as piles of shipping palettes. Such juxtapositions of size disorient the viewer, as there is no way to measure these objects against the body. Worden’s work is strangely broken up in the Museum, making it all the more a surprise to stumble upon his Hollywood sign. The smallest and yet somehow the most clever of his pieces, Worden has spelled out “Hollywood” in alphabet pasta letters on a thin piece of balsa wood. However, this is situated so that only the shadow of the letters upon the wall is visible, not the pasta itself. Again, it is a play on scale and viewing angles, throwing into question one’s relationship to the physical space that the artwork inhabits.

Sandra Ono
I believe Ono’s work could possibly be my favorite of the show. She uses mundane materials that can be found at dime stores – such as press-on nails or plastic grapes – to create flowing, abstract forms. These examples of fake nature seem to take on organic, almost marine-like shapes in Ono’s precise and intricate constructions. She has also created a wall covered with white cast resin cauliflower floating off its surface. Positioned as such, the florets become abstracted forms in space. Ono has a talent for transforming the everyday into beautiful and mysterious objects that hold a touch of the fantastic.

http://www.mills.edu/campus_life/art_museum/past_2008.php

http://ethanworden.com/

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