RISD MFA SHOW

Saturday was a fun day.  Met up with studio-mate Ren to go see the RISD student MFA show at the Providence Convention Center.  In all honesty I must confess that this is the first time I ever came away from one of these shows disappointed.  This is my favorite student show and never miss it.  This years graduates left me a little let down.  There were a few good pieces, however, which is a good thing.  Unfortunately, there were many many more pieces that fell into the "bad zone".

The quality of the videos let me scratching my head...as they were all rather dry and boring, except for one which I thought was amusing. The artist built a small replica of a waiting room, and the video was of a man talking, but none of his sentences ever formed.  It was funny and frustrating at the same time, leaving the viewer to want to really hear what he was talking about.

Another interesting and clever installation was of  3 cribs with video monitors in each of them.  The videos depicted to-scale sleeping/fussing/crying babies.  The viewer was invited to rock the cradles and when you did, this action would wake up the babies. When you rocked it aggressively, the babies cried even harder.  A small gentle rocking motion would slowly put the babies back to sleep.  Very interesting.

I was disappointed that few of the MFA fashion designs were shown.  Usually there is a small collection of  garments but this year there were only 3. There were also some interesting textiles. Interesting because the patterns were beautiful but the colors were quite bland.

This year I felt that the some of the Architecture students marquette's were quite nice.  Their use of materials in the modular forms were pretty cool.  I also liked the graphic design students work...all very good, and I liked that everything was for sale.  The small metals students work shined, as they do consistently every year.

I was really surprised by the lack of the old school fine arts: painting and drawing and printmaking. There were some, but a lot less than than usual. I also must confess that I found them to be lacking. There were a few ceramic pieces...most notably the earthenware bowls with the most gorgeous sketches inside and out.
The very large ceramic installations at the entrance were memorable in that they were poorly thought out and not executed very well.  As a matter of fact, I noticed that there was a tremendous lack of skill in many of the pieces throughout the show.  I wouldn't have cared if I could understand the works conceptually, but many of them seemed flat and without meaning. 

I don't know what to say.  Having been to graduate school at a state college (UConn) I though maybe it would be lacking in many respects, but in light of this show, I'd say put your money into a school that will have a better outcome.  RISD is sitting high on its reputation still...and not showing a whole lot for the cost.