2005 First-Year MFA Exhibition

Columbia University's 2005 First-Year MA exhibition, Metaphase, features diverse artistic practices from twenty-six artists whose work ranges from explorations of dystopian urban conditions to representations of the self in still and moving pictures. The exhibition's title references an early stage of cell differentiation; the chromosomes line up in the center of the cell before further dividing into respective entities. For the past year, these MFA candidates have both worked independently and as a harmonized collaborative within the parameters of a shared, collective membrane.

Julieta Aranda's photograph in Bill's Art World is an image of a perpetually locked storefront in Brooklyn, located just across the street from her former home. Signs—"Learn to Paint Now," "Take A Class," and "Oil Paintings for Sale"—hang over a gate covered with graffiti. The viewer is left to wonder if an alternate art world doppelganger exists beyond the gate, or more realistically, if the image documents an abandoned storefront whose sealed gate serves as a memorial to a failed business. In Aranda's words, "The optimist in me really hopes that in Bill's art world things are different: that art education is free, and students are not burdened with a huge debt the second they finish their studies, and that when they do become practicing artists their careers are based on the quality of their work, rather than on the speculative cult of the young, the cute, and the fashionable." Aranda's Popular Geometry comprises newspapers that suture published articles on abstract public sculpture, examining the inherent disjunction between the artist's intentions and the public's perception.

Gary Hadad presents street portraits from the two states where he resides: Tennessee and New York. Photgraphs such as Boy and Girl with Baby and Tattooed Man with Woman record Americans, red and blue, as they go about their daily routines. Hadad's works, emblematic of the temporality between the street photographer and his subject, exude notions of surreality and abstraction when time is suspended. Moreover, the images reflect Susan Sontag's view that "Photographers need not have an ironic, intelligent attitude toward their stereotyped material. Pious, respectful fascination may do just as well, especially with the most conventional subiects."

Tommy Hartung recycles and resynthesizes urban detritus into transitory sculptural forms. Hartung's process of collecting cultural waste destabilizes identities and institutional hierarchies. The sculptures have a sensory alter-reality: they look and smell like the city from which they were co-opted. Hartung's free-standing Great Wall, Domestication Colony, Sextant lends garbage new significance, a life after death, and incorporates an aspect of the fourth-dimension: the universal human condition of decay.

In the self-portrait Peace, Tenzin Wangchuck represents himself dressed in clothing evocative of street gang aesthetics. Adapting the hand-gesture vocabulary of the street, the artist spells out the word "peace," rather than the name of a gang or a violence-related activity. Subverting fashion signifiers Wangchuck assigns new meaning to heavily coded urban symbols.

Jaya Howey's painting A Vainglorious End in N or Z Scale depicts a battle being fought in the snow. The work, nostalgic in tone, mixes historical references—for example the Civil War, World War Il, etc.—with industrial references, such as "war machines," a smoking-pipe cart, and a cannon ski sled.