sfsu mfa 2010

It's MFA season, that magical time of year when art students all over the Bay Area put their best and brightest work on display.  SFSU opened its thesis exhibition a couple weeks ago already, and seeing it gave me the perfect excuse to set foot on that campus for the first time since I took summer school art history classes there right after I moved to the city almost fifteen years ago.  Reassuringly enough the gallery is right where I left it and right now filled with very strong work by Bren Ahearn, Luke Damiani, Aaron Granich, Matt Kennedy, Taryn O. McCabe, Jeff Ray, and Holly Williams.  Some of the artists work in unusual media, such as Ahearn's massive needlepoint explorations of homoeroticism in sports and McCabe's Shrinky Dink drawings of domestic interiors, while painters Williams and Granich push boundaries as they reference cinematic and religious iconography respectively.  Damiani's spectacularly-constructed wooden boats hang from the ceiling of the gallery supported by thick rope, while Ray creates an immersive experience amongst his architectural sculptures and collages by ingeniously using sound and scent in a side room.  If I were a betting woman my money would be on Kennedy, however, who has created a tongue-in-cheek manual populated with his grainy black-and-white photos of natural phenomena (such as the insect activity pictured above) and geological formations, their stated purpose being to help predict impending earthquakes.  Several images have been printed out large for the exhibition with Xeroxed textures and fold marks intact, and they are all just gorgeous.