Though I am motivated to get out every spring and see what new talent is coming out of the MFA programs in the Bay Area, it takes a special level of determination to actually physically make it to all of the thesis shows. Luckily for those of us who don't manage the complete circuit, curator Kathryn Weller-Renfrow makes the full pilgrimage for us, then each summer gives us a second chance to catch some highlights of that year's MFAs with her annual show Cream: From The Top at Arts Benicia. Weller-Renfrow selected 15 artists that have "risen to the top of their classes" from CCA, Mills, SFAI, SFSU, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis.

Some thoughts on just a few of the standouts among these standouts (apologies to the rest, as space constraints prevent an in-depth treatment of all 15 artists)...

Using just the right level of understatedness, Gareth Spor (CCA) showed a short looped DVD with its sculptural accompaniment, together entitled Illuminating/Illuminated. On a video monitor set in the corner of the gallery, a series of interviewees answer an unspecified question (though it is apparent from their answers that the question had something to do with whether and how people see patterns in their lives.) The frame of the video is cropped horizontally so that only the eyes of the respondents are visible as they speak. In the center of both pupils is a small, well-defined starburst pattern of reflected light. In short order it dawns that the accompanying scultpure, made of five bright fluorescent tubes arranged in starburst pattern, had been situated in front of each person as they spoke, as if the Dan Flavinesque sculpture itself had been the interviewer.

Spor edited the interviewees' answers to his question into short segments arranged in a non-journalistic fashion, more of a collage of people giving utterly serious consideration to the question. Sometimes the thinker is caught mid-thought without words, and their act of naked contemplation becomes the focus rather than the speech which follows. This work probes ever so gently, without any cynicism, the core experience of individual human perception and subjectivity, while at the same time implying the world in which we seek to discern patterns can be seen itself as a singular pattern. All eyes in the video reflect the same percept; what differs is interpretations of that percept, as each individual parses it out through the prism of their own subjectivity.

Coming out of UC Berkeley, Indira Martina Morre appears to be a painter, but uses no paint--only layers of gesso with graphite, charcoal, and ink accents. In one large canvas (60" x 60") called Networks of Isolation, Morre achieves a smoothed, alabaster-like pristine white surface using multiple layers of gesso, between which are embedded layers of wandering, trembling webs of interwoven threadlike lines. Where the lines intersect, tiny circular nodes are drawn, which act to hold the whole together. More like an imagined presence than an actual physical network, the insubstantiality of this gossamer web suggests the artist's reservations about virtual networking's failure to nourish the physical, visceral, and animal social self.

Motivated by an impulse to counter the information overload brought to a feverish pitch by technical advances since the early 1990's, Morre also showed Disintegration of Signs, another large canvas. This work also features a gorgeous, begging-to-be-caressed surface that is 95% white, but this time accented by seemingly esoteric glyphs, which upon closer inspection turn out to be common computer icons (e.g., the "timer" circle with a sweeping second hand to indicate software is busy processing) Layering these symbols in randomly patterned accretive pile in the bottom of the canvas, Morre converts them from impersonal signs into hand-rendered, humanity-inflected, process-oriented marks. Twombly, move over. However, the marks themselves are drowned out by the expanse of whiteness in which they float, their visual impact is minimal compared to the overall calming effect of the sparsely-populated void-as-antidote-to-computer-screen.

There were other artists in the show who likewise followed artistic strategies based in the repetition and accretion of a single modular unit: Mario Trejo and Kate Torgerson (both SFAI graduates). Trejo's One Million (one million hand drawn and counted circles) is exactly what the title implies: a four- by nine-foot canvas covered with a dense thicket of tiny circles drawn with a fine-tipped Micron pen. Influenced by the conceptual work of On Kawara, Trejo creates a certain set of limitations on himself which structure his artistic production relating to time (he has determined ahead of time that he will commit to work in this methodology for four years) and numbers (now that one million is achieved, he's thinking five million next). His working premise is that of an extreme athlete: set a long-shot goal for himself in quantifiable terms, then buckle down and just do it. But what, exactly, qualifies as a "worthy" goal? Trejo leaves it up to his own practice to define.

Another artist whose chosen modular unit, by itself, would not merit much notice is Kate Torgerson (SFAI). Out of three pieces in the same vein, the most affecting was Chronicle: a pile of office paper on the floor (about 4' x 4' x less than a foot high), which appears to have been painstakingly stacked piece by piece into the form of a low hill with a broad, shallow crater in its exact center. Unlike Mario Trejo's quantified One Million circles, it is unspecified how many sheets of blank, crisp, white paper went into this ephemeral installation. Instead of writing a narrative on the paper, what Torgerson "chronicles" is the time-intensive labor of laying down this huge quantity of individual sheets of paper. In the spirit of Tibetan sand painting, which underscores the eventual dissolution of all created forms, the cornerstone of Torgerson's artistic philosophy is to make work that is deliberately "transient and unviable."

The show as a whole explored the interstices between words and experience, the cultural shift into digital modes of identity and mediated perception, the personal construction of meaning, the value of honest/straightforward accumulative physical labor, and the ephermerality and futility of making work at all. Whether it's an indication of confluences in the art world zeitgeist, or of a curator with a crystalline clarity about her own preferences, this show offered a well-rounded mixture of pleasures both sensual and intellectual.

Participating artists: Christopher Burch (CCA), Joe Edward Cornett (SFAI), Joanne Hashitani (Mills), Laura Kramer (CCA), David W. Linger (Mills), Mary Alison Lucas (UC Davis), Indira Martina Morre (UC Berkeley), Vanessa O'Neill (SFAI), Gareth Spor (CCA), Kate Torgerson (SFAI), Mario Trejo (SFAI), Naomi Vanderkindren (Stanford), Kathryn Van Steenhuyse (CCA), Jessica Ann Walker (SFSU), and Marci Washington (CCA).)

Cream: From The Top '08 was on view at Arts Benicia from July 19 to August 31, 2008.