Through the Looking Glass with Tiffany Ma

23 Feb Through the Looking Glass with Tiffany Ma

An MFA exhibit currently on view at Cal State Fullerton installs a fantastical world of imagination in the campus’ West Gallery, but like a wonderland apparition it’s only up for a few days, so if you’d like to see it in person you’ll have to visit soon! Tiffany Ma, who over the past few years has been involved with feminist collective performance art as part of the “Guerrila Gowns” project and was in the recent “Rage Bear” show at downtown Santa Ana’s GCAC, studied photography as an undergrad at San Jose State University, but is clearly no respecter of artistic boundaries, incorporating printmaking, sculpture, performance, craft and spectacle in her work. “An Orchestrated Comfort” presents an imaginary environment that she has worked through in various media through the course of her studies. What began as an idea turned into a sketch and then a photograph; torn into pieces, it began a collage, then evolved into printmaking and wire sculpture.

The MFA show brings it all together in a singular doll house-like installation held up by a large dining room table in the center of the darkened gallery. Appropriately for someone with a photography background, the show is all about looking. There are windows on the outer walls of the structure through which the viewer peers into lighted rooms filled with ladders, hallways and impossibly tall chairs, but no people. There is a sense of aloneness, but leavened with whimsy and wonderment.

For more information about the artist, see tiffma.com

A sense of wonder — Tiffany Ma’s MFA grad show installation at Cal State Fullerton’s West Gallery

The view within

Empty chair

A view of the landscape