At its core, the annual GLAMFA (Greater Los Angeles Master of Fine Arts) exhibition is rooted in the defense and promotion of that which has been overlooked. Organized and curated by CSULB students, GLAMFA represents graduate work from the perspective of its peers, creating an environment that is both nurturing and broadening. Its underdog philosophy is reflected throughout 2015’s show, where absurdity and humor are present in each gallery space, from Omid Orouji’s oriental carpet-upholstered cat tree to Tanya Brodsky’s juxtaposition of the gravity of minimalist art tropes with cheap plastic hair clips. Beneath and throughout the humor, however, is a trace of the melancholy: fruitless attempts to position the self as a coherent subject within the chaos of increasingly absurd environments. The fragility of these attempts is demonstrated in the work of Mona Sheybani, a photographer whose prints are as transitory and elusive as memories themselves, and the quite literally fragile installation of spun human hair from Erika Ostrander.
Further pointing to the troubled distinction between self and other, or perhaps self and other self, Shelbi Shroeder’s polaroid-based Instax Body Project (2013) becomes an abstracted mass of body parts, an interrogation of the body through ruthless close ups. In Schroeder’s work, the body is always already mediated and fragmented: through the lens of camera, the reflection of the mirror, and the white framing of the images themselves. The distinction between self and other is confused and distorted, and any attempt to reconstruct the coherent self is frustrated by the breadth of the collage. Jenalee Harmon takes on what she refers to as “the image as fragmented truth,” relying on her audience’s fluency in the language of advertising and mass media. The thrice-repeated image of a bar of soap escaping a grasping fist in Slippery when wet (2015) magnifies the absurdity of familiar infomercial iconography, and the work’s objecthood further blurs the boundaries between the thing itself and its representation, or as Harmon might state, between the truth and the image.
Skirting the line between the absurd and the melancholic is Krista Bonelli’s Loss (2014). The work replicates the effects of long term nicotine stains on the wall of a home, pointing both to compulsive behavior and the passage of time in an altar to that which escapes unstained from the sullying effects of addiction. Its presentation on a small wooden panel echoes devotional icons, albeit surrounded by simulated nicotine residue and not the traditional shimmering gold. While the work is dominated by grief, its appropriation of the trappings of religious worship presses Loss into the realm of camp: that elusive combination of mourning and absurdity that manages to heal as much as it stings.
Fragmented, ephemeral and absurd, 2015’s GLAMFA exhibition tinkers on the edge of the chaotic, bringing together that which, perhaps, ought to remain isolated. In its refusal to categorize or mediate, however, the exhibition represents a perspective of the in-between: that which spills over, seeps out, gushes and escapes. Simultaneously visceral and intangible, feelings evoked by works like Morgan McAllister’s Jenifer (2015) and Naomi Tarle’s Crisp apples for Fall. Bad apples in Winter. (2015) establish CSULB’s campus galleries as sites of transition and exuberance, vulnerability and insulation. Paradoxes are celebrated and pushed to their limits, reaffirming the necessity of the underdog perspective, which has no duty to coherence or unity, but rather to the jumbled mess of the unspoken.
BIO: Alyssa Schwendener is a current graduate student of art history in the MA program at California State University, Long Beach, currently focused on artistic strategies toward the creation of documented lesbian history. She is writing her Masters thesis on the intersection of photography as an evidentiary medium and the construction of lesbian archives in the work of contemporary artists, specifically Kaucyila Brooke, Zoe Leonard and Nina Levitt.
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