Word: mergel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Look, we always wear black," says Reichek, as students nod solemnly or chuckle. After the class ends, the truth comes out. A student admits that the class's attire had in fact been planned in the studio the night before after TF Jennifer E. Mergel '98 announced that a Crimson reporter would attend the next class. Apparently, the group generated the idea of subverting the "artsy" stereotype, representing themselves as exactly that for the reporter's benefit...
...theme, "The Body," emphasizes the contemporary art world's renewed interest in figuration since the late 1970s. This subject has clearly provided fodder for many of the works in the show, which range from earnest and literal to playful and abstract. Small paper mach'e sculptures by Jennifer E. Mergel '98 sprout lively appendages from their baseball or bagel-shaped body blobs. In one, two straining neuron-like beings wrestle or dance with the energetic whipping of their interconnected arms. Nearby, another languishes on its side, exhaling through some great orifice or wound--an opening of transparent paper skin...
Across the lobby, a group of bricks on the floor shoot up tall waving poles crowned by ruby-red wax lips. Like Mergel's sculptures, "Bricks, Stalks, Lips" by Daniel O. Williams '98 toys with the distinction between the figurative and the abstract. Though economically constructed of the most mundane and inert parts, William's forest of rods refuse to be discussed in anything but the most animated and creaturely terms. Are they simply chatty bricks which grew tall necks for clandestine conversation above our heads? Or perhaps these poles sway precariously like some convention of bizarre supermodels--a mirage...
...Mergel's and Williams' sculptures along with silly-putty blobs (caught moving in hasty Polaroids) by Nick C. Malis '99, a tortuous Frankenstein prosthetic (Brendan K. Greaves '00) and Chris Cooper's redolent beeswax objects all demand anthropomorphic descriptions and at the same time frustrate our search for easy bodily correspondences. While these works may benefit from the exhibition's exclusion of more polished paintings on canvas, they characterize the most intelligent and competent group of student sculpture recently shown in the Carpenter Center...