We’re breaking all the rules.  Even our own rules.
And how do we do that?
By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.

From a pool of 28 nominations from 10 MFA programs in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, 5 artists were selected, each given their own ‘room for X quantities’ in the 5^th MFA biennial exhibition at the DCCA.  Breaking our own rule, we added a 6^th nominated artist whose work does not fit in a gallery exhibition format but whose short film will be screened at the DCCA during monthly Art on the Town artists’ receptions.

Brian Patrick Franklin (University Park, PA)
Systems of opposition intrinsic in games, sports, and military actions are the staples of Brian Patrick Franklin’s current body of work.  The digital prints from Game Day are icons that contain the tracked movements of a football, tennis ball, hockey puck, or soccer ball—the contended object.  The thick accretion or loose filigree of knotted lines within the respective frames are the visual imprint of the rules of each game played out, a different dimension to the dyad of victory and defeat.   Three videos from his Fermata series allude to the “fermata” in music, which is a term for a note, chord, or rest that is sustained at the performer’s discretion for a duration longer than the indicated time value.  Franklin’s videos are continuous loops of athletes such as Jesse Owens, an Olympian diver, or tennis players about to propel themselves into their respective ‘moments of truth.’  Adjusting their foothold, buttressing their muscular pitch, and steeling both psychological and physical will, these moments are the preamble—taut with all that is invested in the pursuit of perfection—to full-throttle force.  Expecting exquisite coordination, grace, speed, and exactness, we hold our breath.  And as spectators, we share in the ‘fermata’ of the moment.  The video triptych played simultaneously on a loop renders the interminable suspension into a kind of purgatorial black hole of tense, unconsummated propulsion.

Elizabeth Hoy (Philadelphia, PA)
Elizabeth Hoy’s site-specific installations are constructed manifestations of the inevitable flux that governs the world despite human determination to build permanent things, write definitive histories, or establish social and cultural norms.  Hoy works with each existing space by getting a feel for its anatomical framework and structural possibilities in order to alter it with industrial and found materials that she hoards.  The existing space becomes the stage for her architectural tableaux of built, layered, partitioned, piled, and stacked elements.  Over the course of the exhibition run of her piece at the DCCA titled There are acres ever through me, she will continuously transform the constructed space, intervening with her own initial response to it and reconfiguring various aspects—boarding up spaces or slicing away—so that the space evolves with subtle or conspicuous changes.  Referring to the process as “an ongoing interruption of space,” she cites the irregularities and even the deliberate, accidental, or corrected mistakes as allowances for shifts in color and light and as a meditation on the imminence of decay and transformation.  Construction materials on their own are generic, seem to imply newly built environments, and are meant to be stable, but Hoy’s handling renders them fragile, as if they were urban ruins.  In fact, she refers to her installations as “excavations—recovered, re-imagined, and reconstructed.”

Matthew Janson (Baltimore, MD)
With titles taken from E. E. Cummings’s poems, Matthew Janson’s sculptures total exploding millionminded and dying is fine) but Death are as spectacular as the subjects of Cummings’s poems: the throes of passionate love in the former and the heavy, heady topic of death that the poet expertly imbued with levity in the latter.  Janson refers to his sculptures as “Baroque constructions that coyly celebrate tragic facades of excess and indulgence while confronting the loss of Modernist ideals.”  The sleek, slick mirror surfaces of his large sculptures are shaped in seductive points and angles, either sucking or throwing light in and from many directions.  Like giant crystalline or mineral deposits, they command from wherever they sit.  And much like the radical viewpoints afforded by the avant-garde Cubists at the turn of the last century, Janson’s three-dimensional objects that refract their environments into smithereens of light and reflection are his materialized investigation of expanded, exploded self-awareness.  He writes, “My work explores contradictions in the pursuit of wholeness.  Like staring into a spherical mirror and finding a single gigantic eye staring back.”

Jennifer Jones-O’Neil (Philadelphia, PA)
In a world of increasingly sophisticated communication tools and high-tech ‘cyberbridges’ that purportedly connect people and ideas, opportunities and opinions, Jennifer Jones-O’Neil states that her practice revolves around the effect of mass media and telecommunication technology on “how people communicate or become disconnected with the same technology.”  Whereas transparency has been one of the trademarks of modernism, the mass transparencies in the open highway of information seem to have unleashed multiple modes with which to obscure or obfuscate our views.  Jones-O’Neil’s photographs are crisp portraits of interiors where such obfuscation or alienation is apparent.  The lone figures are usually off to the side, on the edge of the frame, with their faces partly or completely obscured with color fields of Plexiglas panels blocking the camera’s view of facial features or expressions. The ubiquitous or implied presence of a computer or a television screen suggests the kind of stupor we fall under in domestic spaces.  The intimacy we develop with technology becomes a filter that can estrange rather than connect people.

Joseph Lozano (Ardmore, PA)
“Imagine an entire ocean in a glass,” Joseph Lozano invites in his artist statement. With paintings, objects, and video, Lozano offers a whole cosmology of images and things that have been distilled from ideas culled from his reading selection, itself determined by the core of his own experienced, explored, and imagined world of memories, feelings, and possibilities.  Driven particularly by narratives of water that he parses and fragments, the disparate elements of his installation plumb the depths, skim the surface, and mirror the nuances and mysteries of what is fluid, unfixed, and what he calls “the beautiful brokenness that becomes the purpose of the journey.”  The white cube allocated him pulsates with intimations, correspondences, meaningful gaps, and poetic inquiries into the very phenomenon of being.  Innately alone in a sea of people, we exist within each present moment that inevitably dissipates in order to feed the next one as an essential, paradoxical link to the eternal.  A grid of cups filled with water that eventually evaporates over time hangs over his installation, capturing what is tenuous, fragile, and yet fundamentally present—literally transubstantiated into the air we breathe.

Joanna Wyzgowska (New Brunswick, NJ)
What begins as any other morning in any young woman’s daily routine slowly devolves into a portrait of a mindscape progressively besieged with projected fears in Joanna Wyzgowska’s short video, Ciao, Bella!  With an economy of means—an apartment, a single character, minimal internal dialogue, and a simple editing style that allows the film to lurch to a feverish pitch, Wyzgowska deftly depicts the internal demons that lurk within the caverns of the mind.  Puncturing the picture of normalcy with fits of paranoia, Ciao, Bella! falls in the lineage of psychological films that scrape the surface of the ordinary, revealing the dark, turbulent dimensions underneath rational exteriors.

As diverse as the works in this exhibition are, a common thread that could be limned from the sensibilities of this crop of artists is a cool, dry awareness of the anxieties of our times.  Their works address fragmented realities, memory, fear, and loss without broody expressionism, pontificating politics, or dispassionate irony.  From the eternal anticipation of Franklin’s videos to Hoy’s continuously ‘rewritten’ spatial histories, Janson’s pursuit of wholeness through splintered reflections, Jones-O’Neil’s laconic preoccupation with ruptures in the social fabric, and “the beautiful brokenness” of things in Lozano’s installation, the lucid denouement in the stolid morning light in Wyzgowska’s short film captures the self-possessed courage and intuitive, unmannered lyricism in the attitudes of these artists in the face of disquiet.  They tread the disquiet that might lie in Lozano’s quotation of T.S. Eliot’s

            …heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

--Carina Evangelista
Gretchen Hupfel Curator of Contemporary Art