2007 MFA Fine Art Thesis Exhibition

Natalie Aguilar
Bridget Barnhart
Lina Bokhary
Benjamin Carder
Iris Charabi-Berggren
Amanda Curreri
Anne Devine
Jennifer Durban
Frank Anthony Ebert
Patricia Esquivias
Heather Feeney
Renee Gertler
Katherine Gritt
David Gurman
Jessalyn Haggenjos Barr
Amanda Herman
Marnia Johnston
Robin Johnston
Bessma Khalaf
Melanie C. Lacy Kusters
Sarah Marie Lewallen
Christopher Loomis
Samuel Lopes
Celia Manley
Jack Miller
Carrie Anne Minikel
Elizabeth Mooney
Nyeema Morgan
Harry Muniz
Alison Naschke-Messing
Jennifer O'Keeffe
Karen Olsen-Dunn
Katina Papson
Lee Pembleton
Ryan Pierce
Lacey Jane Roberts
Amy Rose Sampson
Erik Scollon
Marsha Shaw
Shawn Sloan
Reggie Stump
Gabrielle Teschner
Julie Ann Travis
Carly Troncale
Lindsey White
Tom Wiehl
Christine Wong Yap
Jenny Zito

Tom Wiehl
 
Last House on the Left
90 x 88
lithgraphy, graphite, ink, acrylic, charcoal, collage on paper.
2007
 
Artist Statement
My work draws stylistic inspiration from the aesthetics of heavy metal album art, horror films, and apocalyptic science fiction, because of their aggressive stance against mainstream popular culture and, more importantly, their demonstrated futility as forms of resistance. Everything in the world is beginning to converge, crawling toward a uniform deceleration where all depth is frozen into surface. A swelling growth of information has begun to undermine its own purpose, mimicking our inherent procedure for understanding and connecting everything to anything else.

I am using printmaking, drawing, painting, and simple collage techniques to assemble flattened chunks of this convergence. In the large scale drawings, various images of apparently useless, obsolete, or abandoned objects are woven together with tangled and viral masses of homogeneity, short-circuiting the representational function of any particular picture by building a rat’s nest of bleak, nonsensical context. The smaller pieces examine a similar theme but begin with photographic images and pay sharper attention to their specific despondent contextualization. The work as a whole considers the notion of flatness as physically impossible, but culturally inevitable

Contact
tomwiehl@gmail.com
http://www.tomwiehl.com


©2007 California College of the Arts. All rights reserved.