"extra/intra" First Year MFA Exhibition, UC Berkeley

February 03, 2020

"extra/intra" First Year MFA Exhibition, UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley First Year MFA Exhibition, Spring 2020
Featuring: champoy, Fred M. DeWitt, Emily Gui, Biz Iqbal
Anna Riley, Nadia Shihab,
Wednesday, January 29th - Thursday, February 13th, 2020
Opening Reception: 4 - 7pm, Wednesday, January 29th, 2020
Worth Ryder Art Gallery: 116 Kroeber Hall, UC Berkeley Campus
Gallery Hours: Monday – Thursday, 12 – 5pm
Free and Open to the Public

Worth Ryder Art Gallery is on the first floor in the art department building on the UC Berkeley Campus. The gallery is quite large, so seven first-year MFA students were able to have their own space and their art was arranged well together. Most of them used mixed mediums and seemed to want to say something very strongly. However, it was not easy to find out what they wanted to say. I really wanted to have artist background and artwork information but I found only two of the works had titles and the other art didn’t even have “Untitled”. I could say that made the viewer to wonder and ponder about their idea or intention. I gave my email to gallery staff and have been waiting for more information about the show but I haven't heard anything yet.

The most interesting part for me is that Emily Gui installed door frames, chairs, and some images of chairs on thin fabric. This work reminds me of Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1995) because I saw both physical chairs and images of chairs. Additionally, the image of the chair was pretty similar to the chair of Kosuth. I don’t think Gui’s work says the same idea as Kosuth’s, rather, Gui seemed to show the relation between space and object. The door frames would lead me to go somewhere else. This is how we perceive space by seeing certain objects.