You’ve Changed

November 13 - December 20, 2020

Last winter, before it all went south, I found myself staring at the wall in a room full of people. I was held there by the appearance of a ghost. Not quite an inch tall and drawn in black ballpoint pen, its thin outline was only noticeable when you were standing nearby. There were a few other ghosts around, here and there, quietly sketched on the white walls of the museum, but this is the one that stays with me. Above its head was a handwritten speech bubble containing the single word “exhibition.”(1) I’ve thought about this ghost a lot in the months since then. After galleries and museums went dark in March amid the pandemic, and every show was cancelled or delayed, it began to feel like the ghost was a premonition. Unassuming at the time, it was a tiny harbinger of a long season of phantom exhibitions, and perhaps so much more. 

Among the many exhibitions last spring that were paused or pushed off toward the horizon was the final show for the MFA graduates in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.(1) As the gallery at the Logan Center reopens this fall, the room will not be full of people like it would have been before, but artworks materialize again, ghosts no more. As I look at the various works on view though (or their digital forms online), I’m struck by how they carry within themselves the spectral character of 2020. Each of these artworks, in its own way, is attuned to presence and absence, whether exemplified or observed: a lingering sense of disappearance perhaps, or the feeling of something or someone drawing near. 

Take a quick inventory of some of what these works include: The faint imprints of bodies in gold sheets of paper. Scratched names and messages on men’s room mirrors, a rough catalogue of fleeting traces. A vast 1-to-1 map of a solitary studio, austere and empty in its diagrammatic way. A rumpled bed as a site of forgetting, and a shadowy figure on the other side of sheer curtains. A pair of soiled underwear, with no sign of its former occupant. Photographs of abstracted body parts, disembodied and free-floating. A pale silhouette in a cyanotype that rests on the ground, an index of someone who lay there before. Even a femme manifesto finds power at one point in the choice to obscure and to blur.
It seems clear that these spectral qualities grow out of other artistic and human considerations, suggesting a larger frame of reference, and perhaps with it, larger stakes. Within any exhibition of classmates, like this one, it’s safe to assume that a variety of unique directions prevail, rather than uniform concerns or a common mission; nevertheless, I get the feeling that shared attunements connect these works on an deeper level, or even certain underlying questions, interpreted in different ways. One might be the question of how to locate oneself in the world, both on one’s own and in relation to other people. And this dovetails, perhaps, with considerations of perception, or the implications of looking at others and being looked at in turn, as aesthetic registers fold in on the social and the emotional. 

This line of thought feels fitting for this pandemic year, this election year, this year that’s been so ominous and electric and constrained—even if weighing the nature of individual and collective experience, fraught and full of promise, is an ongoing task for always. For months now, a flood of anxieties, isolations, and afflictions has been experienced in individualized, atomized, and often private ways, and yet at the same time they’ve been widely shared, verging on something more universal (at least in kind, if not in degree or in the details). At the very least, these sorts of considerations beckon in whole new ways, amid lockdowns and domestic terror plots, urgent protests for social justice and a seeming doom-spiral of entrenched partisanship, to say nothing of the everyday happenings of life. Which is to say, these questions may be as difficult to sort through as ever.

An artwork can visualize or internalize how people see each other, meet each other, think about each other, fear or desire each other. It can channel a powerful moment of recognition, or a near-miss, or the weight of shame and judgment. In other ways still, all artworks embody a kind of encounter: whether it’s a painting, sculpture, video, or photograph, an artwork is a deferred meeting of sorts between the artist and the viewer, socially distanced and asynchronous long before these phrases came into heavy usage. What kinds of encounters do the artworks in this exhibition imagine? For that matter, what measures of times do these objects and images bring with them? A lot can happen in just a few months. Meanwhile, the past looms over your shoulder. Also, so much stays the same. 

“You’ve Changed,” the exhibition title says, without specifying who’s talking and who’s meant to hear this declaration. The various artworks here might answer for themselves, or they might dodge the allegation, or direct it back at us. Or maybe it’s art at large that is shifting in its seat, changing its orientation, starting to reimagine how to reckon with the world in necessary ways. That reckoning may be anchored in solitary self, at times, but every person moves within larger networks and structures that precede and outlast us, systems that are no less mutable in the end. You’ve changed. Perhaps we all have. Perhaps everything has. It might take some time, and some help from other people, to figure out exactly how.

— Karsten Lund, Curator, The Renaissance Society

(1) Pope.L, the artist who drew the ghost on the wall in his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, also happens to be a professor in DOVA at the University of Chicago—one of a number of professors the MFA graduates featured in this exhibition have studied with over the past two years.