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The Maryland Institute College of Art opened the first of three MFA shows Friday May 26th, in the Fox Building, located on campus. Graduate students from the several Masters of Fine Arts Degree Programs will exhibit their thesis work. Cyle Metzger, a student from the Mount Royal School of Art, MICA’s Multidisciplinary MFA Program, shows a new series of paintings and one small maquette in the Decker Gallery, located on the ground floor of the Fox Building.
Metzger’s paintings are minimalist in style– thin, straight lines and flat, monochromatic tints applied directly to the gallery wall– and minimalist, too, in that they depict almost nothing. They depict empty rooms. In fact, while you are there in the Decker Gallery– a standard white cube gallery environment–Metzger’s paintings seem to draw your attention back to the room in which you stand, a big white space. One difference is Metzger’s rooms are rendered sterile and empty, like the body turned inside out and scrubbed clean that David Batchelor describes in Chromophobia, whereas the Decker Gallery, despite MICA’s Exhibitions staff’s best efforts, is not so pristine. Nor is it empty, because you’re standing there inside it and there’s art on the walls.
While Metzger’s spare paintings seem to disclose next to nothing about the artist himself, his statement tells us he’s transgender and that his paintings deal with “social spaces (bathrooms, bars, airport security, doctors’ offices)… constructed spaces and the complex experiences [he has] navigating through them.” Metzger’s maquette on a pedestal nearby renders the room from his paintings in 3D. In this instance we can see more clearly what is less apparent in the paintings: lines on the floor that allude either to the four mitered corners of a picture fame or the regulation floor markings for some type of indoor sport. The floor is a stage or an arena, the site of performance or representation of identities. Indeed, look up at the ceiling of the Decker Gallery and see the surveillance cameras above Metzger’s work, watching you as you watch the art (Metzger has ingeniously tailored his paintings to this specific site). Gender performance in public spaces (think attire, mannerisms) is strenuously tuned to the expectations of the surrounding world, especially in instances of public restrooms and doctors’ offices, where anatomy itself comes under scrutiny.
In certain ways Metzger’s work is indeed about a trans experience.
But I realize that some people might have trouble with the assertion that a seemingly contentless painting is actually about gender issues. And even though Metzger’s artist statement encourages a queer analysis, his paintings will of course need to operate on other levels.
Standing in the shower this morning, finally feeling weeks’ worth of worries abate at the dawn of this, my day off work, I started to think about the anxiety that compels us to scramble through the days, like rats rather than humans. I thought about anxiety in relation to art practice, the way anxiety compels the artist to constantly perform, to produce ever anew original and interesting efforts, and how anxiety can block thought and creativity.
Metzger’s work seems to address the anxiety of the artist to give the viewers something new to dazzle them. It hands the challenge back to them. Metzger uses the space of the picture plane to ask the viewers to seek answers in the real space around them, in the relationship between themselves and the people around them, to think about social identity. In this way Metzger seems to have arrived at a zero-degree of painting, like Rodchenko when he painted those three canvases red, yellow and blue. What’s left to paint after you paint after you’ve moved everything out of the room? But it is appropriate that Metzger’s work has a sense of finality to it– it’s his MFA show. Nor do I think he will quit painting since much of his previous work also deals with the relationship between what’s on the wall and what’s in the room.
MICA MFA Exhibition I
March 26th – April 4th
Maryland Institute College of Art
Decker Gallery
1300 Mount Royal Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21217
http://www.mica.edu
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December 18, 2010 7:56 am