Now: The 30th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition continues the tradition of collaboration between the University of California Department of Art Practice and the Berkeley Art Museum. Every spring for the last three decades, one of the museum's galleries has been devoted to a selection of new work by Master of Fine Arts graduates. The students are provided with the experience of participating in a museum show, and the community is exposed to some of the most exciting and promising new artists in the Bay Area. The environment of the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley is a supportive laboratory intended to encourage and broaden the visual, intellectual, and aesthetic aptitudes of the MFA students. This exhibition is the culmination of the program. The seven artists featured in the 2000 exhibition-Barbara Ellen Campbell, Aaron De Beers, Nemo Gould, Ajean Alexandra Lee, Dale MacDonald, Mally Mehryar, and R. Yauger Williams-work in a range of media: painting, sculpture, assemblage, sound, installation, and computer renderings. Barbara Campbell's paintings contain a successful balance of color and form. Their large scale allows the viewer the opportunity to wander down the path into the netherworlds that Campbell creates-a prospect she makes particularly inviting. Aaron De Beers's sculpture is derived from car culture, its slickness, sexiness, kitsch, and sheen. His freestanding hula figure is an enlargement of a typical dashboard ornament or nodder, including a bobbing head. The large-scale sculptural installation composed of deconstructed and then reconstructed 1960s and 1970s muscle cars provides a flattened, cyclorama-like alternative stage set on which models can pose. Nemo Gould creates from everyday detritus pseudoscientific objects that focus on the irony and failings of technology. All of his sculptures include animated parts. Gould's work can be positioned within the tradition of Bay Area funk art, updated for the new century. Ajean Lee transports mundane materials like bubble wrap and foam fabric into an ethereal, storybook space. In A Vista, a cascading form culminates in a forest landscape that hovers over ten feet in the air. Thus the viewer is prevented from seeing the scene (which only serves to strengthen the desire to do so). Dale MacDonald creates installations that address perception, usually through the manipulation of a light apparatus. Fascinated by grottos, here he creates a space in which an unusual contrast between light and dark exists due to the absence of natural light. Mally Mehryar's installation, full of personal mythology and metaphor, addresses longing, loss, and acculturation. Xeroxing classic Persian art forms, including miniature paintings and rugs, allows her to address her identity from a slightly removed place. Yauger combines art historical sources with personal interests in his drawings comprised of digital as well as hand-drawn rendering. In an attempt to find a balance between the seemingly contradictory elements of his personal history, he inserts toy soldiers, dinosaurs, a football, field goal post, and cheerleader, a police car, an astronaut, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in and on iconic works by Richard Artschwager, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Serra, Brice Marden, Robert Irwin, Yves Klein, and John McCracken.
