The 33rd Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition represents the culmination of a rigorous two-year MFA program that fosters growth in the intellectual and aesthetic aptitudes of its participants. Each spring for the past three decades, the Berkeley Art Museum has collaborated with the Art Practice Department at UC Berkeley, dedicating one of the museum's galleries to a selection of new work by Master of Fine Arts graduates. In addition to the students gaining the valuable experience of participating in a museum show, the community is exposed to some of the most exciting and promising new artists in the Bay Area. The seven talented artists featured in the 2003 exhibition are Joseph Arnold, Veronica De Jesus, Amanda Hughen, Andrew James, Alexander Munn, Heather Patterson, and Ryan Reynolds. The subjects these artists investigate range from the mechanical to the intuitive, the epic to the subdermal.Heather Patterson employs oil paint and encaustic to emulate the textures, structures, and biological functions that occur below the surface of the skin. Alexander Munn draws inspiration from Homer's Odyssey, as well as the computer-generated environments of video games and the nostalgia evoked by high school football, to create his own mythological world. Veronica De Jesus, Andrew James, and Ryan Reynolds each focus on how the act of observation informs one's perspective, but with radically different outcomes. Part cityscape, part imagination, part social investigation, De Jesus' interactive installations create a fantasy narrative where nature meets psyche. James's manipulations of simple materials result in serialized sculptures that signify how the mind may collect, sort, and interpret information. Reynolds uses color and repetition to create paintings that are built up over time and that seek to reveal the underlying patterns inherent in everyday activities. Boundaries are blurred in the work of Amanda Hughen and heightened in that of Joseph Arnold. In her interpretations of natural and synthetic landscapes, Hughen endeavors to dissolve the divide between such dichotomies as order and chaos, rationality and intuition, the mass-produced and the unique. Through the kinetic energy of his mechanical devices, Joseph Arnold creates situations in which physically isolated objects retain a connection, however precarious. Viewing the work of these artists in a single gallery space affords a glimpse into the rich and varied exchange of ideas they have developed over the past two years, and in which they will now engage the greater art community.
