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University of Guelph MFA Program Exhibition
BY David Balzer July 19, 2007 10:07
Birch Libralato's University of Guelph MFA Program Exhibition is often outrageous, literally: conceptualism remains the name of the game in graduate fine art departments, and that means a fair bit of faceless, coy work. So go ahead and balk (and bark) at something like Victoria Cheung's Number, very simply a stack of white paper with each sheet hand-embossed with the Braille number sign (and going for a cool $1,400). Other works seem, ahem, more interesting, but in an extremely aloof way: Kevin Rodgers' Shelf (Ann Coulter) has a nice little sketch of the titular blond crackpot, though damned if I know what it means. It's pleasant enough to see that Joel Herman has appreciated Josef Albers' designs for Enoch Light's Persuasive Percussion record covers of the '50s, though he's not done much to them that the original covers don't do all by themselves. Mild smiles might be elicited by Jenn E. Norton's Transit Station video piece, which takes on pop culture Ann Magnuson-style (read: in a way that's pretty old-hat by now), presenting a series of fake, trashy programs that come and go, as if being flipped through on a television. The two best artists here, Maura Doyle and Red, take on the city, a good, proper, coherent subject for conceptualism: Red has made a large rug of grass out of foam, and a cool-looking sculpture of little houses on the edge of a giant cliff (apparently it's just a maquette for a full wall piece, which makes it more impressive somehow); Doyle has made a quietly hilarious video about Toronto being inundated with empty chip bags – a pointed reminder that banality comes in much more evil forms than art about nothing.
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