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George Tooker’s
Living Room
By Adam McGovern
THE VOICE OF RUTGERS COLLEGE
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NEW BRUNSWICK NJ Initially, the proposal for the BFA Thesis Exhibition of graduating Mason Gross seniors, currently sprawling through almost every available inch of gallery and hail space in the new Downtown Arts Building, was assumed to be based less in curatorial insight than in MGSA’s shortage of gallery space and of commitment to its undergraduates. However, what has emerged is a show which enlivens and humanizes the former government building, which has been likened to the industrial dungeons of painter George Tooker, in a very welcome way. It is a show whose scope demands a minimum of preamble, and so, on to the work.
A trio of touching documents of personal history is comprised by the exhibitions of Frank Priam, Charles Bryan and Andrea Schwartz. Priam offers a series of paintings based on old family photographs from as long ago as the 1920’s. In the center, a cut-out painting of the artist’s great grandmother stands, assertive and almost sentry-like, next to an old-model radio which emits (by way of a hidden tape recorder) music of the early 20th. Century. The effect achieved is that of stepping into the living room of one’s grandparents, with all its attendant feelings of security and permanence.
While Priam’s work suggests history enshrined, Charles Bryan’s work suggests history corrected. His deft and sensitive realist works depict friends, family members and himself, alone and with a quiet monumentality, or beside or in the context of Renaissance works and pictorial conventions. The fact that the people depicted happen to be intimates of the artist and happen to be black creates a positive assertion of the everyday person against Renaissance and later concepts of exaltation and elitism, and an assertion of the beautiful diversity of our species against the archetypal “humanist” image, which is, of course, male and white.
The most striking quality of Andrea Schwartz’ equally poignant works is that connection to the positivity of childhood. Exemplars of this feeling among Schwartz’ personal document in paint and print media are a large painting based verbatim on a self-portrait that the artist did as a child, hung next to a contemporary self-portrait of the artist surrounded by other works by her younger self. Here Schwartz is beautifully evoking the openness, directness, optimism, love and unique creativity of child hood, and asserting their imperative place in our adult lives.
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CHARLES BRYAN, Photo by Celia Barraza
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A tangential statement is made by Colleen Frendak’s giant Little Golden Book, an engagingly interactive piece whose pages are to be turned by the viewer.
With sensitivity and sadness, nostalgia and melancholy, the work suggests the peace and wonder of childhood and the tragic molding of children’s minds, in this case, little girls’ preparation to be kitchen slaves — the role played in “Little Mommy” is engaging from a child’s point of view, but insidious from a socio-politically aware adult’s.
Such a dialectic is echoed by Deborah Phillips and Stacy Wilson’s installation. In a dimly lit room are placed playful, finger- painted fragments of mylar and paper by Phillips, and strange, intestine-like sculptures by Wilson, all disorientingly complimented by strategically placed mirror fragments and the formally interesting, but also industrially oppressive air-ducts that pre existed in the space. Childlike simplicity and half-glimpsed horror are offset, as area sense of fun exploration and one of men ace: Alice’s looking glass, shattered.
The Rutgers Review, April 26, 1988
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