Nine Lives, Doran Gallery, MassArt, 'til July 2

There are over 250,000 students in the Boston area. It’s amazing how many institutions of higher learning are around. However, our schools try to keep us isolated and insulated from these outsiders, our neighbors. Go out and explore another school ‘round the city for no other reason besides discovery.

Over at the Doran Gallery in one of MassArt’s Artist Residence, there’s a really cool graduate student exhibition going on, Nine Lives. These youngsters are pushing barriers and doing some interesting experiments.

One of these kids was Colin McNamec, who paints very detailed oil paintings of rubbish. There’s overturned sofas without cushions, rusty old gas tanks, wood pallets, piles of dying Christmas trees, tipped-over traffic cones, dressers left as trash, and abandoned strollers next to street light. The extreme detail really added to the harsh realism of his pieces. He seemed to want to show a sort of underbelly, the stuff society ignores.

Next up was Elizabeth (Libby) Foster who painted some of my favorite pieces in the exhibition. Her stuff was very abstract, featuring very bold strokes and colors that wouldn’t necessarily go together anywhere else. But here, I dig her rough, broad style even though I can’t begin to understand what it means.

There’s Susan Spaniol, who had abstract work as well. Hers were more carefully constructed mixed media with pencil, ink, and bits of gold foil. These pieces had more structure than Libby Foster’s, yet I feel more drawn to the latter.

With a whole corner of the gallery for herself, Michelle Leier exhibited excellent landscape oil paintings with a lot of colorful stylization reminiscent of expressionism. It’s cool to see a painter just using classic expressionism, not trying to traverse three or four different styles or mediums at once. Here’s a complementary comparison: Her work reminds me on Monet or Van Gogh, not with the intricate detail of those two, but enough grace and form to say Michelle has incredible talent worthy of the named droppage.

Susan Marie Brundage painted very detailed pictures from the view of someone driving down the interstate in, what I’m totally assuming was, southern Indiana or something. Her work features subjects like trailer homes, liquor stores, and porn shop. Her small paintings, all lined up in up on the wall at the Doran, formed a composite of Middle American vice and shame.
These were all set against grey skies and trees without leaves, but these pieces were not all wholly depressing. Her referential titles kept me smiling. (Ramble On, Fake Plastic Trees, My Old Kentucky Home)

Zehra Khan (a great name) makes black-and-white, ink-on-paper pieces of rodents behaving horribly, drinking, smoking, vomiting, shitting, fucking. A reminder about some of our own species choose to behave, called "Bunny Explosion." One of her pieces turns to color as it leaves the paper and rounds a corner onto the actual wall of the Doran Gallery. I love that. I love a dynamic art piece that transforms the space it’s exhibited in. That’s the future of art, not static, guarded pieces sitting still behind glass cases in museums. This is the future of art.

Felicia Van Bork pieces here the hardest to understand. Here wide, wide landscapes have much ambiguity to them. I’m not sure what she was trying to say. One of her pieces showed what looked kind of like a whale and was called "My Next Body." Does that have something to do with reincarnation? I do not know.

The most innovative piece at the exhibition was the hexagonal booth-type set-up by Amy Baxter McDonald. On the interior panels, it showed truths and on the exterior, facades forced upon women in the Middle East. That which is seen on the outside, the unseen veiled on the inside. It was a sobering political statement and an excellent concept. The haunting and horrifying images included rapes, forced abortions, and the deaths of children. When standing in the center of the booth, the viewer is surrounded by these horrors as these women are everyday.

The pieces by Heather Hudson had a dark irony to them, showing the popular doll Raggedy Ann is compromising and downright inappropriate positions. There was a prelude to a rape called "Trust Me," a nude portrait a la Kate Winslet in Titanic, and other such disturbing sexual subtexts involving beloved childhood toys. I watched my little sister play with the Raggedy Ann doll when I was a little boy and my innocence is thoroughly offended! I’m just kidding. I thought they were all pretty fucking hilarious. Imagine if we were all that close-minded.