Collapsense: 1st Year MFA Exhibit

The limits of language are the limits of my world. -- Wittgenstein

No single word in the English language adequately characterizes this moment, so the MFA class of 2025 coined and defined the word Collapsense. This naming recognizes power and precarity in the time of ecological and political crises, and it inaugurates the annual Spring First Year Graduate Student exhibit. On view at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery are heterogenous objects and gestures elucidating collapsense and expanding the limits of our world.

The exhibit features new work by: Viviana Martinez Carlos, Priyanka D'Souza (1/2 Resting Museum), Arianna Khmelniuk, Jasmine Nyende, bryant terry, Zekarias Musele Thompson

“Entering the gallery, the viewer encounters bryant terry’s Razed Bed #2 immediately; this six-foot tall structure of stacked rectangles, wooden boxes that form the frames for garden beds, eludes immediate reading as it looms above eye level, at once asserting a presence while cloaking its intimate interior. Through the spaces between the wooden planks of the seven stacked rectangles, a green bucket sits at the center, filled with soil, compost, and nine red-handled spades. The artist placed heirloom collard green seeds in this soil in an act of reclamation in a practice that marks a culmination of terry’s two decades of food justice activism. terry focuses on process as essential; the work is not just the sculptural project but the procedure, which the artist documents in a video. The footage offers a demonstration of both the ebonizing technique of naturally darkening wood and yakisugi, a traditional Japanese method of wood preservation;. terry sets this window into his practice against the soundtrack backdrop of an original song by his band Saint State Street entitled “Parfait,” which features the artist’s mother singing “I feel better, so much better, since I laid my burden down.” The intrinsic interconnections of food, justice, and community all resonate in this installation, underscoring the collective theft of black life, culture, and land in the violent and exploitative history of the United States. The collard seeds embedded though not yet growing in the soil reclaim this food’s contentious history, connecting their nutrition with life-sustaining nourishment both physically and spiritually. At the same time, the seeds serve as witnesses to the centuries of anti-black oppression and death; the garden beds stacked to six feet are the depth of a standard burial plot, and soil itself is made of decayed matter, which in the United States includes physical links to the brutalized black bodies whose labor and culture were so pervasively stolen and exploited. Razed bed #2 is not redemptive exclusively; rather, the work is a call to action, which terry emphasizes through the inclusion of his mixed media drawings A Plot to Topple and Hoard, which show configurations and possibilities for the boxes to unload, come alive, and undo what has come before.”

—excerpt from the Collapsense catalogue written by Madeleine Morris, PhD Student, History of Art at University of California, Berkeley

all images taken by David Schmitz

bryant terry, video documenting the artists process creating Razed Bed #2 sculpture (soundtrack to the video is “Parfait”by the artist’s band, Saint State Street). Video, 02:29, 2024.