College art thesis exhibitions can be messy, rambling hodgepodges, produced on a shoestring and looking spirited but makeshift. It’s precisely their unpolished raw energy that accounts for their allure. They also reveal what is influencing artists of tomorrow – from which established artists they’re looking at, to the inspiration they find in ever-evolving contemporary culture.

Through Dec. 20, “Free Fall” at the Sistered art collective is an ideal venue for immersion in this dynamic energy. It is the brainchild of Joshua Reiman, associate professor of the MFA in studio art and sculpture and the sculpture program chair at Maine College of Art. His novel idea? Pairing the work of a dozen BFA and MFA students with that of 12 practicing artists from Maine and beyond.

Reiman writes in the exhibition handout: “These pairings operate through common themes, use of color, senses of empathy, beauty, gender, and the lifting up of ideas and people – all in response to this crazy world we live in.” Students and more established artists were not necessarily aware of each other’s work, which, of course, makes the juxtapositions all the more interesting.

The show moves through various moods: eerie, charming, sexually charged, woozy, lyrical. At the entry, we find the thematically dark black-and-white photography of BFA photo major Alara Murphy and Paul Guilmoth of Peaks Island. Both mine discomfiting imagery. Murphy’s “Isolation” captures a woman lying in the grass. It clearly conveys the sensation of the title, yet also a feeling of menace in that she appears lifeless, like the corpse of a kidnap victim. Guilmoth’s nocturnal photography can be equally unnerving. The comfortingly titled “Neighbor” is actually an image of a house consumed by fire.

The pairing of photo BFA student Jackie Christie and Brooklyn, New York-based transgender artist J. Houston exudes a fleshy corporeality. Christie’s images (a bite imprint on an arm, a pair of feet, a collection of pulled molars) telegraph the vulnerability of the human body even as they assert its physical sensuality. Houston’s (mostly portraits of people in various states of undress) have the naked frankness of Nan Goldin’s work, but feel softer and more affectionate. Also like Goldin, Houston’s “Duane in the Morning” challenges gender identity (the bearded Duane is dressed in women’s clothes).

Next to this, the pairing of sculpture major Zoe Fox and Rockland artist Anna Queen (part of the Sistered collective) alludes to the most primeval of gardens: Eden. Fox’s take is disarmingly fantastical. Her mixed media sculpture “Bulbs” uses plaster, foam, steel, wire, paint and Swarovski crystals to improvise an enchanted plot of toadstools, twinkling crystal flowers and bulbs that turn smiling faces toward the sky. You half expect to spy fluttering fairies amid the flora. On the wall, Queen’s iPhone displays a photo of a snake. But the title, “Probably a Garter Snake,” assures us it is not Eden’s malevolent serpent.

The staged tableaux of photography major Sov Kong and Portland artist Richard Takita engage in a particularly interesting conversation. Takita’s photos show a man and a woman (actually Takita dressed as a woman) holding the Japanese flag and reaching out with their other paint-stained hands. The subtext here is the Fukushima nuclear accident, which brings up contemplations of defilement (the paint), alienation of irradiated victims and other themes. Kong’s pictures portray two boys looking up at a UFO and a bizarre being that appears as one torso connecting two bottom halves of the same person. The latter looks like an alien form or the deformed result of something perpetrated on him by an extraplanetary being. In their presence, Takita’s photos take on other interpretations: emphasizing the “alien” in alienation or questioning our ideas about abnormality (the four-legged being, Takita’s gender switch).

The next two pairings dive into childhood. North Chatham, New York-based Allison Hester presents 22 childlike gouache drawings of cats, which Reiman juxtaposed with sculpture major Bianca Troppmann’s “Return of the Sunflower Man,” a happy-faced sunflower that looks like a kid’s drawing come to life. Richmond artist Christopher Patch’s “Too Many Owls” taps into Hansel-and-Gretel fears of the dark forest, while painting BFA student Clara-Luz Hoffman’s “Red Girl” and the figures in “Look Here,” all resembling animated Tim Burton characters, seem to react to it in horror.

BFA student Kyle Hardy shows three colorful, deftly painted tragic and tragicomic events – a car crashed into an obelisk, a burning house and a homosexual couple, one with a bottle rocket on his crotch (ironically titled “Last 4^th of July”). Next to it is a work by Lauren Donovan, a more established Portland artist pursuing an MFA at MECA. Called “Rich People,” it depicts a septet of wealthy types who are oblivious to Hardy’s dramas next to them. They’re hung high so that they look down on the viewer. Donovan’s other painting brings together unrelated images from her Instagram feed, suggesting the disconnection from context and reality enabled by technology and social media.

Technology also appears obliquely in the work of Bar Harbor-based Chris Gray, another established artist pursuing his MFA at MECA. Though “Planxty Damm (Sunset Over Graham Lake)” appears at first glance like a traditional Maine fishing scene, the horizon is actually a representation of how music appears on a music-editing program (Gray is a musician). Reiman placed Gray’s works next to those of BFA candidate Tyler Van Etten, who paints more familiarly rendered Maine subjects: a lighthouse, himself eating pizza in the car and a woman chowing down on lobster.

Maine-born, New York-based Tyler McPhee paints himself into various images of magazine covers (Life, High Times) whose “cover stories” deal with hallucinogenic drugs. They have a hippie 1960s vibe, as does painting BFA student Casey Haims’s rheumy, psychedelic acrylic on plywood next to them. But entheogens – from ayahuasca to psilocybin mushrooms – are a very of-the-moment topic, popular anew for their transportive spiritual properties.

Both Latinx BFA student Sidney Sanchez and Gabon-born, Portland-based Titi de Baccarat incorporate colorful found elements in their works. Sanchez’s mixture of painting with beadery flowers, gaudy pompoms and fiber elements resembling vegetables picks up on a tradition that blossomed in Latin America in the 1960s-70s: the use of kitschy symbols to reaffirm indigenous and folkloric culture, rituals and identities that rebuke the social and economic impacts of colonialism. In a similarly flamboyant way, de Baccarat’s figure celebrates the innate beauty African Blackness, particularly of women.

The next pairing brings us back to the garden, using landscape to focus on the spiritual. Portland artist Hilary Irons evokes the last three verses of the Quran in acrylic on paper. Painting BFA Chloe Hammond’s fiber and watercolor work is more obscure, but seems to say something ineffable about the bond between mother and child.

Finally, the synergies between New York City artist Justin Pollmann and the oil-on-panel paintings of BFA painting student Zoe Dieffenbach are mostly in their layering, though a subtext might be about the body. Pollman separates magazine images from their context by inkjet-transfer into new configurations, often collaged into overlapping faces and female forms. Dieffenbach’s lushly colored and layered abstract works have an incredible depth of field, the body element represented by what appears to be human hair mixed into the paint.

Students and established artists are not identified, which I found confusing (I spoke with Reiman to decipher them). And the work is uneven, but versatile enough to enage most any taste.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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