If you've got an eye for contemporary art and you want to catch a rising star, this is your chance. Master of fine arts candidates have thesis exhibitions up at local art schools this spring. These shows offer viewers a chance to see what fresh ideas are emerging and what new artists are worth keeping an eye on. We spoke with five promising graduates.
CATE McQUAID
Nelson Da Costa - 37
PAINTER | The School of the Museum of Fine Art
Da Costa lays patterns in black over colored patterns to make images that jump. For all their brilliant tones and dancing rhythms, they also address the artist’s childhood in war-torn Angola. By the time he was 14, both parents had been killed. After he was shot in an attack on his orphanage, doctors gave him art supplies as he rehabbed his wounded arm. One doctor, a Cuban, took him under his wing and sent him to study in Cuba.
Homeless when he first came to Boston five years ago, Da Costa stayed at the Pine Street Inn, adjacent to the galleries at 450 Harrison Ave. He made friends with other artists and landed at the Museum School (and an apartment in South Boston). Da Costa has already found gallery representation, with Gallery NAGA on Newbury Street.
‘‘You have to live with trauma,’’ Da Costa says. ‘‘I’m taking these emotions and putting them into images based on a metaphor for war, for missing people, losing people, and cultural displacement.
‘‘I have one picture of my dad in my wallet, but none of my mother. . . . one of the paintings, in blue, the title is ‘Mom.’ It’s a poetic notion of what ‘mom’ means. I miss my mom a lot.
‘‘I’m not sure what’s next. I’d like to work with kids and help found a nonprofit organization to use art to heal psychological wounds.’’
Georgie Friedman - 34
VIDEO INSTALLATION ARTIST | School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University
Step into the darkened gallery, and projections of water and sky surround you. Friedman’s big, gorgeous visions of the sea and heavens, videotaped separately, don’t quite fit together, with perspective shifts and images angling around moveable walls and a pillar. The artist taped many of them in Massachusetts; she captured the aurora borealis on a research trip to Alaska.
‘‘I’d been looking at sky and water, and thinking about how they move around us continually,’’ Friedman says. ‘‘Some of us pay more attention to them, and some don’t. But they don’t care about us, either. Katrina wrecked all these people’s lives.
‘‘The aurora borealis was so amazing. They start off slow, just these green lines. Then one night they went crazy. I was so freaked out and excited, I couldn’t use the footage — it’s too jumpy. I had to go back the next night and keep the camera steady.
‘‘The Atlantic is here, and the Pacific, local bays and harbors. Eighty percent is local skies, shot in the Southwest Corridor Park. . . . The moons were shot here, the stars and auroras are from Alaska. It’s like playing God — ‘I think I’ll put a little sky here.’ ’’
Julia Fernandez - 24
PAINTER | Boston University
Fernandez-Pol's abstract canvases, big and small, rollick with marks. She pushes paint with a squeegee, makes sculptural filigrees like those on wedding cakes, and builds up layers of thumb-size dabs with a palette knife to make giant fish scales. She's restless, playful, and experimental with her material. Her most recent paintings were inspired by the Great Barrier Reef.
"I come from a family of scientists," says Fernandez-Pol, who was born in St. Louis of Argentine parents. "Dad would yell at us in Spanish, 'Look, look, look,' pointing at something unbelievable in nature. There's a parallel with what I find with the paint.
"Since I've come to BU, I've tried to push being uncomfortable, not doing the same thing over and over, but developing a language of mark-making.
"Paint and form become one. A mark can feel like a three-dimensional form, but it's one mark. I'm treating the paint like a living entity, and letting it breathe itself into life.
"[My most recent work] has started to come back and integrate all my different kinds of mark making. . . . At one point I was restricting the marks, I didn't want to overindulge. But now . . . it's amazing how it all circles back, and how it makes sense."
Clint Baclawski - 27
PHOTOGRAPHER | Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Baclawski mounts his large-scale color transparencies of crowds coalescing and dispersing in double-sided light boxes with dimmers. Stay longer than 30 seconds, and you'll see the light begin to fade or rise. It's a startling effect, like an unexpected eclipse. Baclawski will have work in the "Exposure" exhibition at the Photographic Resource Center opening May 22.
He uses a large-format camera, which means he has to duck under a curtain to shoot. The resulting images are stunningly sharp.
"I like to call it an extended hyper-focal range. It's like when we squint," says Baclawski, who grew up in Pennsylvania and got his undergraduate degree in advertising photography at Rochester Institute of Technology.
"I've been photographing crowds, the way they transform around spectacles. It's about this feeling of unity - for a crowd to merge into a group, there's a sense of unity they're lacking in their lives.
"Some are straight photos. Others, I have manipulated. . . . I photograph multiple frames and make a composite. I like to add tension. You see it in the way people glance at one another."
Pete Froslie - 29
MIXED-MEDIA ARTIST | Massachusetts College of Art and Design
A student at Mass Art's Studio for Interrelated Media, which ties together art and technology, Froslie came to Boston from Reno having automated old toys, such as an Etch-a-Sketch that drew on its own. Once here, his vision grew larger: He wanted to create a mythology, like that in a computer game, and objects - some automated, some not - that spring from that mythology. He began with Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth - only in this world, Booth attempts to manufacture oil using plankton, and he has an arm amputated.
"My dad was a military commander," says Froslie. "I was looking at what he was attracted to. We were talking about the Civil War. [With Booth], there are strong options for political allusions. . . . I did Air National Guard before I came to political maturity. My shift from conservative to liberal gravitated me more toward art.
"There's a game manual that delves into the connection between the works, and steps you through the process of creating your own Booth. He's your vehicle for dealing with the mediated landscape in the game.
"Booth is still in its infancy. . . . I want other people to take these guiding points to push that story. The end product would be to automate this new Booth, create a fan base that will change him and grow his world."
