The Ick and Id at U.N.O.
Vee Adams’ Collective Drip
Mushrooms are all the rage in wellness, cooking, and leather alternatives, making Vee Adams’ MFA thesis show, Collective Drip at U.N.O. Gallery, right on time. Adams’ two and three-dimensional works synthesize a world in which fungi and fauna are upcycled to charming—and gnarly—effect. Days before the show opened, the artist learned that U.N.O. planned to terminate the graduate program. After much pushback, the university agreed to hear a faculty-led defense of the MFA program. Adams’ excellent show joins that defense not with rhetoric or statistics but art itself.
U.N.O. is the only off-campus university art gallery in New Orleans. This means students and faculty have a base within the arts community, and the community expands with academic participation. University art programs and exhibition spaces can and do become insular and hyper-academic. Context is crucial when it comes to contemporary art, and the academic context trends cerebral, over-explained, and id-deficient. On the other hand, the St. Claude orthodoxy often shows up all id, lacking follow-through and professionalism.
Last Sunday visiting St. Claude, I had to ask attendants in two different galleries to finish setting up artwork that required plugging in or turning on—one gallery sitter acted miffed. There was a group show where viewers had no access to artists’ names, titles, or media because apparently someone had made off with the gallery copy of the list of works. At U.N.O. Gallery, by contrast, I was greeted by the artist who pointed out the artist statement, informed me that visitors are free to handle certain artworks, and then let me get on with looking at the exhibition. Some professorial energy and good old-fashioned, classroom-type planning ahead may be just what St. Claude needs. Vee Adams’ deeply felt and meticulously executed exhibition is a case in point.
As usual, I passed on the artist statement and proceeded to the main space of the gallery. Four objects resembling slices of a small tree trunk are displayed on light pink screenprinted wallpaper with a darker pink motif I couldn’t identify. Spores, I realized after reading the label: Cruising the Undergrowth: Schizophyllum Spores.
The tree-slice panels, hanging at irregular heights and distances, contain pictures—black linework illustrations under a waxy surface tinted pink. The three smaller panels are titled:
- Cruising the Undergrowth: Entanglement 2 (Ants and Schizophyllum Commune)
- Cruising the Undergrowth: Entanglement 3 (Millipede and Schizophyllum Commune)
- Cruising the Undergrowth: Entanglement 4 (Snails and Schizophyllum Commune)
Ants, snails, and millipedes belong to three different biological classifications. They are pictured within a rootlike network of mushrooms. Schizophyllum commune is a species of fungus, a mushroom. Looking at the insects—especially the millipede—made my skin crawl, but the screenprinted illustrations are pleasing to look at under the rosy encaustic wax.
The fourth and largest panel shows two figures of undetermined age and gender, facing each other, one kneeling, one standing surrounded by the same mushroomy bramble as in the smaller works. Their heads are flowers, a tulip and an orchid, and something, maybe the roundness of the hips, suggests they are female. This age and gender ambiguity seems to touch on a theme in the work without spelling it out. The world these creatures inhabit is free of tension and the atmosphere is playful and innocent (in spite of a slightly kinky dynamic). The kneeling character’s hands are crossed but not visibly bound behind their back and their shorts sport a cut-out that reveals a round bottom. The standing figure’s arm is raising a whip without menace. The characters are reminiscent of Victorian children’s book illustrations and the secret drawings of “outsider” artist Henry Darger, whose sweetly dressed Vivian Girls also inhabited a self-contained pastel rife with edgy conflict.
In another encaustic work, a disembodied forearm is the subject of The Slippery Wet of the New (A Wet Hole a Rotten Log). The arm, palm up, is covered with gross pink bumps and the skin is sprouting tall, thin mushrooms. It’s icky and I want to look away, but the drawing itself is oddly pretty, thanks to the effect of line, color, and wax. There is also a bit of gold leaf in this and other works in the show. Sigh. Whenever I see gold leaf, I think of Coco Chanel’s advice to take one thing off before leaving the house. For me, that thing is always gold leaf, which looks cheap and excessive. Through a jagged hole in the skin of the forearm, we catch a glimpse of a star-speckled sky, a motif repeated in the installation of wallpaper and a fortune teller in the back gallery.
There is a lot of work in the show but somehow, it doesn’t feel crowded. The exhibition offers viewers a hypothetical world, from its microorganisms to the macro of its universe. Printmaking undergirds this show, but its material vocabulary is wide and includes sculptures, two-dimensional pieces, and installation. Collective Drip is both an imagined world and a non-linear story, the theme of which is transformation.
I usually don’t read artist statements because I find most actually do the work a disservice. I consider the art the statement. Breaking with personal policy, I read the first sentence of Adams’, a requirement of a thesis (but not the show). “Facing a daily onslaught of transphobic political attacks, extinction, and endless warfare—this body of work envisions queer and trans futures full of riotous life…”
Artists have been instructed and habituated to write artist statements. For me, they read as a lack of trust in the art or the viewer. Sending the artist out to hover around the work is like sending Mom on a teenager’s date—awkward. Adams’ artwork boldly shares a dreamed-up world that proposes a real desire for a tolerant world connected with nature. But the statement opens in the negative. Like my therapist says, “Say what you want, not what you don’t want…” Art says it better, and speaking over it is an institutional impulse, not a creative one.
MFA programs, and undergrad art programs too, preach the doctrine of over-explaining. I don’t like it, and it is one among several other reservations about the academic mode of art-making. But I know from my own MFA experience and from years as a participant in multiple art communities that this degree can have a substantial impact on an artist’s quality of life and quality of work. It can offer access to a range of career paths and can push an artist to level up. It can provide an introduction to a global network that exists around contemporary art. And perhaps most importantly, it can afford an artist time to work. As the only public university in New Orleans offering an MFA, the preservation of U.N.O.’s MFA program seems not only worthwhile but essential.
Art will exist with or without university programs. It always has. But nothing says we are crumbling as a society like truncating the arts. Art will not always make bottom-line sense, but it will always be a sign of abundance. People want to be where the art is. Art deepens thinking, encourages empathy, fosters creative problem-solving, and makes participation in shared culture possible, not just for artists but for everyone. Vee Adams’ thesis show makes a compelling argument—without words or numbers—that U.N.O.’s MFA program is doing something right.
Collective Drip runs through June 7 at U.N.O. Gallery. For more info, check out unostclaudegallery.org.
Top image: The Slippery Wet of the New (A Wet Hole a Rotten Log); Aquatint, chine collé, hand marbled paper, gouache, collage, gold leaf, and encaustic on wood
Photo by Emily Farranto
