MFA Thesis Exhibition Closing Saturday

The UC Davis students’ Masters of Fine Arts Thesis show will come to a close this Saturday.

The show, which opened June 3 at the , is called "The House of Others," and it features seven UC Davis MFA students and a very diverse body of work.

The artists featured this year are Jen Cohen, Lisa Rybovich Cralle, Manuel Fernando Rios, Benjamin Rosenthal, Matthew Taylor, Paul Taylor and Mathew Zefeldt.

They have embraced the exploratory tone of the MFA program, which is reflected in the assorted styles and mediums on display. The exhibition includes an array of large-scale sculpture, installation, video and painting. 

Particularly engaging is Lisa Cralle’s collection entitled "AMBASSADOR," which is a series of sculptures that controls what the viewer can and cannot see while they walk through the installation.

The piece ushers you through the large-scale sculptures by way of a series of smaller sculptures, adding detail and insight to the atmosphere.

"AMBASSADOR explores the use of theatrical conventions (costume, props, body language) as signifiers of persona in a digital age increasingly distinguished by issues of privacy and self-display," Cralle said on her website.

Here's a bit more of what Cralle had to say about her work and the theme of the show in general: 

My contribution to the show is a densely arranged sculptural environment.  The sculptures function like props on a stage that the viewer is expected to enter.   Most of the sculptures reference the body or costume  (as a surrogate for the body) in a blatantly theatrical way, with oversize cartoonish simplifications and exaggerated forms.  These theatrical references to the body are a means to address the performativity of persona, or the day-to-day "staging" and "costuming" that we partake in on social networking sites as well as IRL.  I am not interested in fictional avatars, but rather the natural construction of persona that we partake in daily.  For instance, how we “stage” our facebook identities to portray us as well-read, clever, good-looking, someone who goes to interesting events, etc.

Another featured artist, Paul Taylor, displayed a series of captivating pieces called "Disrupted Structures." His collection is a series of sculptures installed around the city of Davis. They appear at the gallery as a series of photographs.

Taylor’s work takes a number of everyday urban elements and recreates them as art by changing their function and placement. For example, taking a traffic lift-gate and placing it in the middle of an agricultural field where it cannot control traffic or really hold any function at all.

The pieces manage to hold interest because they question the normalcy of our everyday landscape. 

"The House of Others" will feature those pieces and more until 5 p.m. on June 25, the final day of the show.