Vernissage: San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) MFA Show 2009
Herbst Pavilion, Fort Mason
San Francisco, CA
16-23 May 2009

by Tonya Warner

Ah, Spring.  The parks start filling with bodies, the mockingbirds come out to mate, and for a short flash of time MFA students emerge from their studios to offer up to the scrutiny of the art world the final product of two intense years and many thousands of dollars.  Ah, the warm, motherly, legitimizing embrace of art school.  This year’s SFAI MFA show was a definite mix of the over- and under-conceptual, with a heavy indulgence into the sort of lofty self-referential kinds of work that need the structure of academia to justify and support their existence.  Here are a few students who were able to find a healthy balance between concept and aesthetics and create genuinely interesting work.

Carina Baumann

Baumann’s photographs are dark, haunting, their subjects barely emerging from a consuming blackness.  They seem like analog holographs - only appearing at certain angles – creating a sort of hidden presence.  The portraits and landscapes are funereal, but not “goth” or overwrought.  They are a meditation on death and the cycle of life.  Dark but not morose, their ambivalence and otherworldliness encapsulate the inherent complexities of fully facing the issue of mortality.

Jennifer Brommer

Brommer’s series “The Wechslers” consists of large c-print portraits of a Victorian family, each member acted out by the same model.  Beyond the well-worn territory of the performative nature of identity (especially in front of a lens), with a dash of gender issues thrown in, these photographs are startling and mesmerizing.  The open-ended and ambiguous narrative they create draws you in.  As a viewer, you are aware of the artifice but still can’t help feeling there must be a story there.  Personally, these images also cull up my own fascination with the remnants of Victorian details found in the homes of San Francisco, and a curiosity with what the original spaces and inhabitants were like.

Grover’s piece, “Chimes,” is a fine example of how good art can be simple.  Consisting of a small forest of touch sensitive acrylic rods, the visitor activates the sounds of falling water, building to a storm depending upon the level of their interaction with the work.  Visually, the piece looks like a giant showerhead with jets of water frozen in place, they await a participant to unstick them in time.  It is an interactive sensory experience that relates to body movement while it connects visitors to art in a rather magical way.

http://www.sfai.edu/Event/Event.aspx?eventID=1825&navID=261&sectionID=7
http://www.carinabaumann.com
http://jenniferbrommer.com/
http://jonathangrover.com/