Towson Universities Spring MFA Exhibitions
Coinciding with the opening of Reverie and Alchemy, Towson University put on a packed evening of shows which included four graduating MFA students: Lolo Gem, Tara Youngborg, Nguyên Khôi Nguyễn, and Cody Pryseski. This show also inspires confidence in Baltimore as it cements Towson University as a second important buttress the art scene in the city. While MICA may often seem like the monolithic institution from which the arts flourish here, Towson repeatedly asserts itself as a school with an arts program that produces strong MFA candidates and puts on exciting exhibitions.
Lolo Gem, Whisperer (2024), glazed ceramic, 17” x 16” x 16”
Lolo Gem was a strong opening to the exhibition, her work and section of the gallery is more or less the first thing you experience when you walk in and it shows a collection of paintings and ceramic sculpture. Lolo describes her practice as “[creating] playfully absurd work populated by fragmented figures, sentient calligraphic lines, exuberant motion, and personified objects” with “imagery culled from vintage comic books & early animation…” Sharing comic sensibilities with artists such as Kenny Scharf, OPAKE and Peter Frederiksen, Gem uses the language of animations like Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry, and Felix the Cat to create new, chaotic, and emotive compositions. Gem’s Labyrinth (2024) reminds me of a specific scene in Disney’s Fantasia, where Mickey Mouse plays the short lived role of wizard, commanding an army of brooms to do his bidding. Though the scene is not specifically referenced in this piece, the fantastical scenes within that film and the style of animation do resonate within Gem’s work. In fact in this specific work, a hand holding a candle exists in an M.C. Escher like room with a level of architectural chaos and confusion that perhaps surpasses even the scenery of Fantasia. Gem’s ceramics sculptures also capture a playfulness that gives cohesion to the painting and sculpture, something that is difficult to achieve when exploring two mediums that are so different. Whisperer (2024) and Perceived Threat (2024) both utilize the material not unlike Brad Blair’s work upstairs in a way that uses the best qualities of the materials and relies on other media’s strength when needed. The cotton clouds in Whisperer (2024) give a strange, dreamlike and ethereal quality to the nervous sculpture that holds a note reading “i think we’re in DANGER!” Similarly, the acrylic chains in Perceived Threat (2024) compliment the soft pink checkerboard upon which the sculpture exists and pokes fun at the durability, strength, and binding quality of steel chain.
Labyrinth (2024), acrylic, pastel, colored pencil, and pumice on canvas, 48”×54” Image courtesy of artist website
Cody Pryseski, Pancakes (2023), 40” x 30”, mixed media on panel
Cody Pryseski’s work has elements of playfulness but is frankly much more sinister. In a selection of nine paintings, Pryseski shows a style drastically different from his work before graduate school which the artists admits is heavily influenced by Lucien Frued and Philip Pearlstein. His new works feel much more like a mix of Jean Michele Basquiat and Francis Bacon though the imagery and titles seem to scratch at stories that are deeply personal. These works have the sketchy, gestural quality of oil stick and repeated motif of the disembodied head that feel in line with Basquiat’s work and the violent, incomplete haziness many have come to love in Bacon’s work. Though some of their influence may be somewhat direct there is an undeniably clear progression of the artist work through their time in graduate school and at the end of the day, if an artist isn’t growing and expanding their practice in graduate school I think it is hard to make an argument for the success of the program as whole. Pryseki’s work has come a very long way from the more subdued and realistic portraiture he’s made for much of his career, this new shift shows flexibility and very possibly a general excitement that all too often can be lost when an artist find something they decide is their niche and lose interest in making major shifts. The materiality in Pryseki’s thesis work is as violent and dynamic as the screaming mouths, bloody noses, and cracked jaws his figures maintain. Building layers of paint, scraping away and adding more while keeping some simple spatial and playful linework mixed in to his compositions create works of art that vibrate and keep the viewers eye moving throughout. Of particular interest to me were two much more quiet compositions, one of a row of urinals that feel like something out of a roman catholic church and the other a bus with a Newport logo on the side. These two pieces feel much more observational and do a lot of heavy lifting in the way of breaking up his grouping of works and giving space for pause and slowness in an otherwise manic and chaotic collection of images.
Cody Pryseski, Urinals (2024), mixed media on panel, 12” x 18” and MTA Bus (2024), mixed media on panel, 12” x 18”
Nguyên Khôi Nguyễn, still from In Our Own Time: One Couple’s Fertility Journey (2022), a 6-part serial cartoon for McSweeney's.net on Nguyễn and his wife's fertility journey, image courtesy of artist website
Nguyên Khôi Nguyễn, a self-described cartoonist, showed a series of works ranging from video to drawing to coloring books that talked about his immigration from Saigon, Vietnam to Cape Coral, Florida. Nguyễn took the opportunity to host a mini karaoke session during his reception which was nothing short of lively. Part of Nguyens thesis work consists of Still In Love: Karaoke Suite 2025 an instillation including animation, music, a wall mural, and coloring books equipped with a cup of crayons and a rug and set of pillows to enjoy the karaoke screen with. The resulting animation is a lovely melding of all of Nguyễn’s skills, the songs are catchy, unique and all include songs that “explore parenthood, loss, and dating…inspired by outreach work with Vietnamese-American youth in Rochester, Massachusetts.” Certainly the first time I had ever seen karaoke at an opening reception, I think the atmosphere of togetherness and shared experience that comes from karaoke is one that fits thematically with the overarching narrative in Nguyễn’s work. It was truly a pleasure to take a quiet moment on a cold day to sit with the stories Nguyễn portrays and see his varied approaches to art that in this show span the aforementioned animation and installations to a series of prints titled A Vietnamese American Picture Dictionary, Saigon, Florida, and In Our own Time.
Tara Youngborg, screenshot from notatownbutalandingpage.com, 2025, website
Tara Youngborg showed two works, a multi-media instillation and a website with the URL https://www.notatownbutalandingpage.com which was also the title of her thesis exhibition. Younborg describes her installation work as experiential and a compression, layering, and translation of space time and memory. The installation she shows as part of her thesis exhibition is certainly a layer of the organic with the inorganic. Vines made of mesh conduit with thorns of cut plexiglass fill a tightly packed space that shows a video projected through some of the vines and onto a screen. Youngborg says of the work “…I am exploring the ghost town of Frenchtown, Maryland, the site of one of the first railroads in the United States: the New Castle and Frenchtown Railroad. When the railroad was abandoned, so too was the town, and I am interested in the ways that technology, capital, and data compound to create ghosts and loss, and determine how these stories are saved and shared. As always, I am thinking about contemporary and historical technologies, glitch, and ideas of memory and site with this ghost town and railroad.” The website is undeniably confusing, it constantly refreshes, redirects, and features a number of GIF’s that feel like something of a RuneScape inspired Homer’s Web Page. The importance of Frenchtown in this work is unclear, the artist seems much more interested in digital history than literal and while the story of the city does speak to the loss of information it seems to me the site itself is much more of an experience than anything informative. It seems that the guise of Frenchtown’s history in these two works exists only as a framework through which to investigate information as dynamic rather than static.