Finding Meaning in the Complex: A Review of the WSU MFA Thesis Exhibit

Meaning is something that can oftentimes be quite difficult to detect. It generally takes a great deal of effort, imagination, understanding and empathy to fully comprehend all the levels of depth that can exist in art. For this reason, meaning is frequently overlooked. Many people tend to simply look at a work of art and focus only on the surface qualities, deciding if it is aesthetically pleasing or not. However, every once in a while there comes a time when the meaning of a work is absolutely overpowering and cannot be ignored. The Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition proved to be just such an experience.

Of the artists showcased in the exhibit, every one of them added a great deal of depth to each of their works. While this complexity was often very difficult to understand, it was certainly not hard to detect. For example, it was fairly obvious that Brad Dinsmore was saying something quite profound with his work Epistemological Notebooks (2009). Epistemology is a subject that is very challenging to understand in its own right. Attempting to explain the nature of knowledge is guaranteed to be complex, especially when trying to do it through illustrations. Dinsmore’s notebooks, while hard to comprehend, at least succeeded at getting viewers to think about their own definitions of knowledge as they attempted to link the title of the work to the drawings on the screen. Though it seemed a common mistake was to try and find some kind of similarity between each one of the pages in the notebooks. Each notebook was just a jumble of various images, separate from all the others. However, it may be that this was the statement the artist was trying to make. Perhaps the development of knowledge has no pattern or linearity to it; knowledge may be derived solely from a person’s experiences and the random snapshots within their memory. Dinsmore was not the only artist to make a commentary on knowledge and the human experience.

Dustin Price was another artist from the exhibit whose works were steeped in epistemological meaning. The work he constructed in the middle of the exhibit, Untitled (2009), was especially captivating. From a distance it appeared to be just a beautiful, snow-covered tree. Upon looking closer though the viewer immediately notices something else going on in the work. Rather than snowy leaves, Price’s tree was covered in little white Buddhas and surrounded by white pillows on the ground. Now Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) is famous for resting/meditating for a long time under a tree while attempting to reach nirvana. It could be that Price’s tree was just a simple tribute to Buddha and his way of life. However, it may also be that Price was attempting to create a monument to the pursuit of knowledge. Buddha’s way of life was focused on the search for truth and knowledge through meditation. The creation of the Buddha tree surrounded by pillows could just be a way in which to highlight the human desire to achieve knowledge and describe/understand human experience. Another artist who tried to describe human experience was Tobias Walther.

Right away Walther’s work entitled Sailor (2009) appeared to be significant. Most people expect movies to have a plot and follow a logical progression. For this reason, Sailor was quite surprising and unique. The film essentially puts the viewer in the shoes of someone running across the Palouse. There are also random images from around Pullman interjected throughout this search; images of things such as doorways, tunnels, and machinery. It could be that Walther was using this film to emphasize some of the same points that Dinsmore and Price were. Knowledge may not follow a simple linear progression but a jumble of the various snapshots from a person’s memory. It may also be that humans are drawn, like Buddha, to be constantly searching for knowledge and truth in an attempt to explain human experience (i.e. the man searching around the Palouse).

The Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition, while certainly complex in nature, did appear to have a clear theme. The exhibit as a whole was focused around knowledge and describing the human experience. While the pursuit of knowledge is central to human existence it is jumbled and inherently flawed. Being human therefore involves actively trying to sort through the jumbled images of experience in order to develop a more accurate picture of the world.