Story Time at MassArt: MFA Students Mount an Ambitious Exhibition

Masters of Fine Arts thesis shows tend to be assembled by rote, to each student their alcove, but the current exhibition at MassArt takes a different approach. The work of four graduating students is shown screen-to-frame in an interlocking mishmash that simultaneously evokes the Real World of gallery exhibition and underscores the conceptual consonances that are the natural result of the intense group dynamics of an MFA program.

Two fully polished, museum-ready pieces anchor the show, both of which feature narratives obliquely told and formal elements that disorient the viewer.

Stephanie Cardon's Echo's Chamber is a wooden structure, eight feet cubed, divided into three rooms by walls that have had massive leaves precisely cut out of them. Once inside the structure, the viewer is bombarded by a series of bizarre noises coming from speakers suspended from the ceiling. Careful experimentation reveals that at least some of the sounds come sampled straight from one's own footsteps inside the structure—our own little echo.

Meanwhile, a voice bounds from channel to channel in the speakers above, reciting a text written by the artist that has something to do with the mythological Echo. (Cardon's work draws heavily from antiquity and literature.) The narrative is as difficult to follow as the voice itself, which rarely rests in one audio channel for any length of time and has a tendency to double-up on itself—the artist's lingering echo.

Gretchen Burger's Unwrapping is an ambitious video installation that takes up the entirety of the darkened back room of MassArt's Bakalar Gallery. Two sheets of plexiglass hang from the ceiling, each displaying—on two sides—video projected from above. Four characters appear in front of a black backdrop, each repeating a series of more or less complicated gestures. Burger herself appears, almost literally strikingly, as a boxer. The installation is a work of "gestural storytelling," although the specifics of the narrative are fuzzy. Faceless menace, innocence lost, ritualized violence: you can let your mind do the rest.

Though the piece is a two-channel video work, it doesn't always feel that way. Burger's greatest accomplishment, beyond the eerily clean lighting on her subjects, is the seamless editing that weaves each channel together so that they work, at times, in unison to undermine the easy interpretations a first-time viewer might make of the piece.

Other outstanding work, also with a pronounced narrative emphasis, includes David Thacker's museum-of-self called Salvage: a New Reliquary and Courtney Lockemer's Dusting (Swiffer Bikini), which derives its punch from performance art and second-wave feminism. (Full disclosure: This author's cat and domestic partner appear in the latter work.) MassArt's Bakalar gallery is free and easy to get to, and the show, which closes Tuesday, is well worth a sunny afternoon.