Purchase College MFA Thesis Show

Andrea Barone, Jennifer Conrad, Sarah Fuhrman, Amy Gartrell, Elizabeth Knowlton, Eugenia Malioykova, Lachell Workman

Curated by Faye Hirsch, Associate Professor and MFA Coordinator

As befits them, the seven students receiving their MFA’s this year from the School of Art+Design, Purchase College, SUNY have chosen a multivalent title for their final exhibition. The source for “all cats are gray in the dark” goes back to the 16th century, but it more famously appears in a letter from Benjamin Franklin to a young friend. Here he advises the young man to sleep with an older woman, because when the room is dark, “all cats are gray,” i.e., you can’t see anyway, so you can enjoy her sexual sophistication without having to look at her. Misogynous traces cling to the phrase, though when the British group The Cure composed their lyrics to “All Cats Are Gray,” the 1981 song that was the more immediate inspiration for the seven women who make up our class of 2015, the phrase was transformed into a dreamy refrain with no agenda.

Typically Andrea Barone, Jennifer Conrad, Sarah Fuhrman, Amy Gartrell, Elizabeth Knowlton, Eugenia Malioykova and Lachell Workman have, in their title, veered away from the obvious in favor of poetic open-endedness. Even Workman, whose photo-based work is arguably the most “political” in that it taps into the fraught Zeitgeist of racial stereotyping, approaches her theme with a delicate if firm obliqueness. The enigmatic stance of her black male subject, target of projections both physical and metaphorical, allows meaning to circulate freely, offering viewers the opportunity to think–in the sense Hannah Arendt, one of the authors we read in seminar, might have intended–and perhaps act. Such freedom in viewing is cultivated by all these artists. We discover in Barone’s abstract paintings a liberating jouissance; her abstract canvases seem to glow from within, as she coaxes light as if from a faceted gem. By contrast, Malioykova’s abstract paintings and prints are cool, their blue and gray palette and monumental forms suggesting an urban architecture of endless reflection in which we lose our bearings. In her videos, Conrad develops characters who might sacrifice their very dignity to expose their all-too-human–and familiar–emotional vulnerability. Knowlton, who forges in her sculptures and video a sometimes veiled alliance of the digital and sexual, encourages a recognition of the corporeal ramifications of our virtual lives. Through the absurd narratives and ecstatic color and brushwork in her figurative paintings, Fuhrman loosens the psychological grip of familiar childhood tropes and a sexualized popular culture. Gartrell at once toys with perception and extols the pleasures of making in her trompe-l’oeil objects that combine found industrial and finely crafted materials.