Rutgers in New York: Spin-out

Featuring work by Shiva Addanki, Emma Berry, Jules Gårder, Nilo Goldfarb, Terrell Halsey, Andrew Jarman, Graham Krenz, Nate Millstein, Jake Paron, and Ana Rucker. Curated by Lekha Jandhyala

The thesis exhibition is often regarded as a culmination. This notion does not quite land here. It is too neat, too resolved. Spin-out is a group exhibition that comes after it, serving as a threshold that opens onto something that keeps spinning as we try to step into it. This show feels like a handoff many of us know, into conditions that are turbulent and shaking, quite violently, beneath our feet.

So, the works appear in dispersals and slight disjunctions. No unified statement or theme, just a show of relations that should not fully cohere. Spin-out exhibits a set of recurring relations: tension, nerve, occasional alignment on the fantasy of an optimized self. A self that is constructed again and again, deliberated upon, and sometimes consumed. 

Repeated image-making, printing, painting, and twisting of clay demonstrate a sustained inquiry that transfigures infrastructure into ornament and body, hair, and text into social registers. The exhibition places a found children’s toy on a journey with an insatiable coyote who points to a burial ground. Here and onward, the artist-sitter and critter relationship is unsettled while collectivity and action flicker across a bent but continuous wall. 

Spin-out gathers a collection of works with no singular trajectory. Instead, the exhibition circles a kind of convivial core catalyzed by ten artists. 

Westbeth Gallery Hours: 1–6pm

Inquiries: Rich Siggillino, Mason Gross Galleries Coordinator, res241@mgsa.rutgers.edu 

About the department
The Department of Art & Design at Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts seeks to cultivate a diverse community that values visual literacy, critical dialogue, experimentation, and the skills necessary for sustaining a creative life as artists and designers. Central to its vision is engaging in interdisciplinary research and embarking on collaborations within Rutgers and beyond, leaving an imprint on the global arenas of contemporary art and design. Studio arts training is offered in design, drawing, media, painting, photography, print, and sculpture. The department offers five degree programs: a bachelor of arts, a bachelor of fine arts in both visual arts and design, and a master of fine arts in both visual arts and design, as well as a minor in art. Mason Gross Galleries, a 4,200-square-foot space, showcases up to 10 student exhibitions per year—all free and open to the public.