Introduction By Stephen Cullenberg, Dean College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences University of California, Riverside Compass 2007: New Art from the University of California's MFA Programs is a survey exhibition of work by MFA students who graduated in 2007 from the eight UC campuses with art departments: Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and San Diego. Compass 2007 is a presentation of the new UCR ARTSblock, an integrated art complex in downtown Riverside. Encompassing nearly 6000 square feet, the exhibition is presented in both the UCR/California Museum of Photography and UCR Sweeney Art Gallery, two of three venues that form the ARTSblock. This is the first exhibition in recent history to survey all of the UC's art departments. Appropriately, it follows close on the heels of UC Riverside's first class of graduates from its new MFA program, making UCR the eighth UC with an MFA art program. For UCR curators Ciara Ennis and Tyler Stallings, the thirteen artists in Compass 2007 represent the crËme-de-la-crème coming out of the nation's premier state University system, one that is spread out across the vast geography of California as well as its diverse urban centers and bucolic countryside. Special thanks are due to all the art department chairs who lent their support: Loren Partridge at UC Berkeley, Lucy Puls at UC Davis, Bruce Yonemoto at UC Irvine, Russell Ferguson at UC Los Angeles, Jim Isermann at UC Riverside, Jane Callister at UC Santa Barbara, Margaret Morse at UC Santa Cruz, and Louis Hock at UC San Diego. Printed Catalogue Available | Download PDF Curatorial Essay The following essay was co-written by Ciara Ennis and Tyler Stallings. Their initials CE and TS appear after each section that they wrote. The artists are presented in alphabetical order. Before writing the essay, they flipped a coin twice: the first, to decide who should write the introduction and the conclusion, and, the second, to decide at which point to divide the artists in half. Compass 2007: New Art from the University of California's MFA Programs is a survey exhibition that touches upon the most contemporary of contemporary art-the freshly minted MFA graduate. How much closer could you possibly get to what's new? Compass 2007 is a professionally curated survey that encompasses the entire state of California. This is a contrast to the annual Supersonic exhibition of just graduated MFAers from Southern California that includes students from art departments at private and state universities. Supersonic is curated by the students themselves, with the venue changing each year. Recently, several schools have elected not to participate. When we began the process of reviewing proposals and conducting studio visits, we pondered whether or not certain tendencies would make themselves apparent. Would geographic location have some kind of determinant effect on the work produced? Would certain faculty dominate the discussion? After making our final selections, we found that work produced at either end of the state could comfortably be exchanged with one another. This could be a sign of the high quality of work or the homogeneity of practice-suggesting that same art theory is being taught throughout the system, or that the globalization of a certain kind of art practice has taken hold. Students did talk about specific faculty members with whom they worked, but we did not necessarily see a direct correlation. Then again, today's art departments do not expect allegiances of any sort, whether to media or aesthetic philosophy. But, if we were asked, two artists that we heard evoked several times were Bruce Nauman and Jean-Luc Godard-the former always exploring the space he is within and making that process into his art, and the latter emphasizing a challenge to the way we see the world as determined through the cinematic viewpoint. Perhaps this is why nearly half the works in Compass 2007 are sculptural installations and the other half are single-channel video projections, with the inclusion of only two painters. Lastly, you hear talk of the anxious grad student who feels lost if they do not have a gallery lined up by the time they graduate. This speaks to the viability of a career as a practicing artist in today's world and to the phenomenal rise of the art market. Depending on your vantage point within a university art department, these circumstances could be good or bad signs for this newest batch of UC graduates. TS CHRISTINE GRAY UC SANTA BARBARA Passionate and celebratory of the immense grandeur and exquisite beauty of the natural environment, American landscape painters of the 19th century sought through their paintings to conjure God's influence on the land and to illustrate His paradise on earth. A heightened color palate and painstakingly fastidious brushwork were central to achieving this opulent and divine illusion. These outsized landscapes, believed to have been painted directly from life, were often comprised of real and imagined multiple views seamlessly collaged. A similar merging of real and fictional forms is central to Christine Gray's practice and clearly evident in her exquisitely rendered paintings of fantasy landscapes. Whether desert, countryside, or other vast open space, the trees, sand, and mountains in Gray's environments are thoroughly stylized and refined to their simplest forms. They stand out against exaggerated skies: mackerel or magenta, mauve or streaked with blue. The heightened color and reduced forms evoke not a palpable space but its familiar translation, the exaggerated 2-dimensional imagery of cartoons, video games, and CAD programs. Further emphasizing this allusion is the small scale of the works, with canvases sized like modest computers or television screens. In addition to painting, sculpture plays an equally important role in the production of these works, employing still-lifes comprised of cardboard, Styrofoam, paper, pipe cleaners, and other scrap materials. From these elements, the artist constructs facsimiles of architecture and uses these models for observational painting. The majestic skies become backdrops to the structures painted center-stage, creating an immediate tension between the two painterly idioms: stylized fantasy environment versus observed still-life rendering. Gray thus revises the 19th century landscape painting, becoming both creator and embellisher of the vista. CE DOUGLAS GREEN UC IRVINE Of the three indicators of sociopathic tendenciesñbed wetting, fire-setting, and animal tortureñDouglas Green is guilty of at least one. Using a lock of hair, a knucklebone, or a photograph as a trophy, the serial killer will re-live their conquest through the gruesome talisman, a key component in their elaborate ritual. There is a resemblance of such a formal ceremony in the work of installation artist Douglas Green who obsessively collects, catalogues, and documents snails before subjecting them to brutal deaths. Untitled 42 Day Exhibition (and underground deeds... until I am caught) (2006) mimics the type of sadistic behavior performed by serial killers; initial nurturing of the prey, ritualized killing, and specific disposal of body, except with snails. Untitled 42 Day Exhibition comprises a room-sized structure made from cheap transparent plastic that extends to the ceiling and expands into a series of tubular vents that reach up into the rafters (not infrequently a killer's secret lair). The 2000 snails, oblivious of their fate, feast undisturbed on a healthy diet of lettuce leaves strewn across the floor, but not before being given a name and number that is scrawled across their backs and then tabulated and recorded on a graph. Picked off one-by-one, the butchered snails are wrapped in a shroud of copper wire and combined with others to create a macabre daisy chain of gastropod corpses to decorate the interior space. Reminiscent of Damien Hirst's A Thousand Years (1990) that features flies feasting on a rotting cow carcass, copulating and laying eggs, only to be executed by fly zapper, Green depicts a comparable doomsday eco-system with an added touch of melodrama. The intense fear that we seek as pleasure is satirized in Green's Swallowing Butch (2005), achieved through the appropriation of a segment of Robert Wise's film The Haunting (1963), an adaptation of the novel by the brilliant Shirley Jackson. Green inserts himself, in the form of a cross-dressing ghost, creating images of comic fury and pantomime angst that underscore the camp nature of the gothic romance and our lurid obsession with death. CE RICHARD HALEY UC DAVIS Just as Wile E. Coyote's scrupulously laid plans for snaring Road Runner are invariably doomed to fail despite the thoroughly imagined and fool-proof inventory of the Acme Company, Richard Haley's efforts to realize his harebrained projects remain unfulfilled. Failure is every bit a part of his practice and essential to the process as evidenced by his earnest approach to his idiosyncratic projects. Like fellow alumnus Bruce Nauman, whose particular spirit of exploration permeates the studios at UC Davis, Haley experiments with photography, sculpture, installation, and video using himself as the subject of his work in an attempt to stretch the limits of what is and can be conceived as viable practice. Portable Hole Proposal: in nine languages and dialects (2005) depicts Haley throwing himself to the ground repeatedly and with enthusiasm, undeterred by the earth's relentless solidity. Like many of these task-orientated works, they reference the performance/endurance works of the 1970s that tested the artist's physical and psychological limits. The absurdity of Haley's act, however, encourages humor rather than terror. In other works, the deliberately shoddy production values of his objects provoke an overtly pathetic reading which purposefully challenges their meaning and value. As evidenced in Exercise in Redundancy versions 1, 2, and 3 (2006), a series of historical plaques cast from margarine and marshmallow, their authority is immediately undermined by such ephemeral material. These unstable monuments allude to the "Guns and Butter" theory of national economy that describes opposing ratios for a secure society. Concerning overreaching failure, Hermann Goering said, "Guns will make us powerful, butter will only make us fat." Haley's plaques, like much of his work, combine elements of the comic and the tragic, the heroic and the ridiculous, leaving the viewer oscillating between these magnetic poles. CE TERRENCE HANDSCOMB UC SANTA BARBARA Foreboding and nervy, Terrance Hanscomb's Der Himmel über Kalifornien (the Sky Above) (2007) evokes the gritty mood and hard-edged intensity of a cold war spy thriller. Divided into multiple parts, Der Himmel über... is a complex and compelling film shot mainly in black and white that seeks to conflate California's enduring obsession of the body beautiful with a deeply buried and strongly denied death drive. A stream of grainy, smiling portraits of missing Californian children kick off the first part, Totesengel (Angel of Death), with the names, dates, and ages of the lost children recited in German. The Teutonic tone, distressed imagery, and litany of lost souls connect present day California and its body tyranny with the physique fascism of Riefenstahl's Olympiad. The melancholy, although expressed more poetically, continues in Todesfall (Catastrophe). In stark, barren shots of the desert east of Los Angeles, a tragic tale is told of bewildered angels whose wings catch fire as they fly across the desert. Unwärter (The Deceiver) is conjured in the following sequence-involving a circumcision performed on a banana-imbuing with dread Der Fremdartiger Wunsch (The Strange Wish) an abandoned drive-in movie theatre is haunted by the faint sound of the Beach Boy's Surfer Girl hauntingly rendered in the background. The companion piece to Handscomb's epic narrative, Miserere: Nachtrag zu 'Der Himmel über Kalifornien' (Afterward...), crosscuts between shots of seedy motels in Venice Beach, a brutal scene from In the Realm of the Senses (1976) and a circumcision parlor where men are having their penises altered for aesthetic reasons. A clinical how-to text accompanies the image sequences and is accompanied by 16 year-old Friedrich Nietzsche's somber musical composition, Miserere (1860). Handscomb's homage to Wim Wenders's 1987 film Wings of Desire of palpable melancholy and the deferred romance of earthbound angels is clearly visible. Just as the expressionism, noir, and undeniable angst makes direct reference to the number of German émigrés who helped create this country's influential film industry, Der Himmel über... fits uneasily into this tradition and Handscomb wouldn't have it any other way. CE KARA HEARN UC BERKELEY Children are profoundly selfish (perhaps this is why we are so frequently nostalgic for our youth). Uncurtailed, their behavior can be egotistical and cruel, especially when at play. There is a need for omnipotence and a desire to force others to do their bidding and execute their narcissistic plans. By the time we grow up, in most cases, it becomes clear that such unchecked impulses are largely intolerable in the world outside the playground, but they remain a definite asset in the artist's studio. Not all artists indulge in such practices, nor as gleefully, Kara Hearn does, as witnessed in her series of obsessive and witty films where she functions as the director, actor, cinematographer, and set designer. There is something inherently contradictory about her work however: on the one hand it suggests a desire for complete glory (by playing all the roles and having total control); conversely the films resist such lime-lighting by virtue of their low-budget, amateur theatrics and almost introverted nature. Reincarnated Scenes (2005) is a series of shorts, re-enactments from particular films that made her cry. In each vignette, Hearn plays all the characters with minimal alteration to herself. In a reinterpretation of Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-terrestrial (1982), she is simultaneously the anxious mother, curious son, and alien creature dying on the bathroom floor, cutting back and forth between the characters. What makes this work so compelling is the deliberate lack of artifice and the earnest stamp of the dedicated amateur. The scenes are shot in her studio or apartment without stage management and using whatever props come to mind-a drum stick becomes Darth Vader's light saber and a student kitchen the site of a charged encounter. The effect is to reduce the cinematic process to its barest essentials, to reveal its artifice, and encourage the viewers to throw themselves eagerly into the recollection and wonder of the children's garage pageant, or solo shower concert. CE JAMES KHAZAR UC SANTA CRUZ Television is evangelism's gift from God, its most effective pulpit, and a direct channel into the wallets of thousands of lost souls in need of salvation. There is something much nobler, less partisan, and more spiritual in James Khazan's preaching practice and exploration of faith-based systems, for he uses the computer as a window to people's souls. Illuminated Dreams (2007) is an interactive program built in Adobe Flash that seeks to conflate early Christian beliefs and teachings with dream imagery, narratives, and the collective unconscious, the contemporary equivalent to the visions of martyrs and saints. It is comprised of a lectern structure with a flat screen monitor embedded within. The monitor is vertically orientated to mimic the page of a book, and the interactive program consists of Khazan' substantial personal dream inventory collected over the past two years. Appearing as an illuminated manuscript, the program allows the viewer to navigate a path through the dense embedded network of text, image, and aural experiences that may variously lead from one poetic, abstract, or theoretical association to another. Early Christian manuscripts sought to control interpretation of the script through text, image, and annotations in the margins and squeezed in between the lines. Khazan adds his own remarks to the illuminated form which, instead of confining interpretation, lead to endless imaginative possibilities and permutations. Khazan's hyper-sophisticated medieval self-directed teleprompter persuades the viewer to lose themselves in their own reveries through memories triggered by Khazan's database of objects, symbols, and text. CE LINDSAY LAWSON UC LOS ANGELES Lindsay Lawson's video Sum Over Histories (2007) uses the Venn diagram as a structural device, a visual motif, and as an allegorical undertow. Used as an illustration in mathematics, it is often shown as two circles representing two sets of different characteristics, and when portions of each overlap, this intersection represents shared characteristics. It is this junction that interests Lawson and gives rise to her looping narrative-scenes and characters at the beginning appear later in the middle and then again at the end, for example, but not necessarily throughout each vignette. Lawson has cited filmmakers Maya Deren and Jean-Luc Godard as influences. Both experimented with juxtaposition in radical ways, the former with disparate spaces, and the latter with character asides and startling title frames-all were efforts to depict a "more real" sensibility through cinema. Indeed, Lawson said that she began planning the film by first imagining the transitions between scenes first, rather than the complete scenes. The in-between spaces of transitions and intersections are the areas where connections between two points are made for Lawson. In this regard, an important vignette near the center of Lawson's video involves two brothers rollicking in the backyard, one older, the other younger. The older one looks to the sun and points his finger directly towards it. Suddenly, he realizes that he has created an imaginary line between him and the sun-a direct link between the seemingly eternal orb and the ephemeral existence of man. There are scenes of this nature throughout the video-ones in which people observe themselves in a point of time, and try to connect to something greater, such as the universe's Big Bang. TS JASON LUTZ UC RIVERSIDE Jason Lutz's imagery in his large-scale paintings is composed of a pared down vocabulary of icons-contemporary celebrities, famous cinematic still shots, and art historical images that have attained kitsch-status through endless reproduction. However, unlike the more familiar Pop art from the 1960s that sometimes appeared factory-made rather than hand-made, Lutz has made the decisive move of including "drips" in his works. His drips suggest both failed and pathetic attempts to mimic the slickness of advertising and mass media images. They also function as a disruption in their polished nature, as if reinserting the primacy of the body and all its messy connotations within our overproduced, mediated environment. In Melody of a Fallen Tree (2007), Lutz recasts the rolls of Michelangelo's Pieta (circa 1500). He replaces the Virgin Mary with Kirsten Dunst, a Hollywood actress dressed in costume from her 2006 role as the historical figure Marie Antoinette. Instead of cradling Jesus Christ in her arms, she comforts the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz (1939 film adaptation). Lutz switches Michelangelo's two religious figures, which represent high culture and are part of the foundations of western thought, with a pair of contemporary fictional characters from mass culture. By replacing the figures we are forced to reconsider what has become rote to our retina. And at first glace, Lutz's composition would appear to follow in the steps of Warhol, seemingly embracing consumer culture while critiquing it too. However, a more serious thought is there too-we are reminded that the theme of sacrifice was as the center of the Pieta, an idea more important that the worship of idols, whether from Christianity or from Hollywood. TS PATRICIA MONTOYA UC SAN DIEGO Patricia Montoya is working on a video project consisting of interconnected short videos that examine the city landscape from the perspective of rooftops in Tijuana, Mexico. She presents the city as a conglomerate of memory traces of her childhood in MedellÌn, Colombia. As a border town, Tijuana is a location for both departure and arrival-a metaphor for the emigrant experience. Candide (2005) is an experimental narrative about lesbian love and emigrant longing. Its title references Voltaire's 1759 novel, Candide, or Optimism, which satirized Leibniz's philosophy that concluded, in essence, that we lived in the best of all possible worlds, despite the tragedies that surround us. However, the public expression of lesbian love too often exiles one no matter where you live,. This double expression of not belonging geographically and culturally-of this not being the best of all possible worlds-is at the heart of this work. The Chairs (2007) is a theatrical adaptation of Eugene Ionesco's 1952 play of the same title. In both the play and the video, an old man and an old woman frantically prepare chairs for a series of guests who never arrive. In essence, they attempt to create a recognizable structure in their lives in order to make sense of the surrounding chaos. Montoya's characters in both videos act as Ionesco did when he was learning English. He copied sentences and memorized them. But this process forced him to examine each word individually-"chair," "floor," "kiss"-and in their grammatical nakedness he felt as though he was tapping into a truth about the object or action itself. In fact, Montoya's literary references in both videos are to works that suggest an absurdist world-one without inherent meaning, so one must find one's own meaning, whether "there" or "here." TS EPHRAIM PUUSEMP UC LOS ANGELES Ephraim Puusemp's work revolves around an interest the act of imitation, copying, and representing. Unlike the hidden secrets of stage magic, Puusemp reveals the processes and mechanisms responsible for his illusions. The Persistence of Vision (2005) is a video of a wall projected onto a constructed architectural copy of itself. As the video progresses, bright flashes of white disrupt the video. These flashes create the effect of an after-image in the eye of the viewer while simultaneously illuminating the artificial construction on the projection wall. The image of one space projected on its copy within the gallery creates an experience that slides between the ephemeral and the tangible. Untitled: Loop Generator (2006) is a rotating sculpture containing a miniature architectural space in its interior. A video camera mounted inside this interior captures the view as it is endlessly encircled, broadcasting a live video signal into an adjacent space. In this second space, the view from within the spinning architectural model is projected life-size, creating a virtual endless corridor. In both works, Puusemp explores how it is we construct so easily what we think is real. His work shares a kinship with artists who create "open-air mechanisms." They incorporate the wonder that one has of wandering through a science museum, but with a poetic sensibility. A lineage of such artists range from Marcel Duchamp's Rotary Glass Plates (1920), to Robert Whitman's sculptures in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated projected films, to Jon Kessler's work in the 1980s that utilized mechanics and cast shadows, to Charles Ray's sculptures that add slight twists of perception-bending to everyday objects. In the end, despite a love for mechanical illusions, their wizardry is less important than their poetic ingenuity. TS JOHN SISLEY UC RIVERSIDE John Sisley's photo-based works explore the idea of inaccessible, latent information experienced through the erased or destroyed photograph, the lost or unseen film, and the damaged record. In Audiotape #2 (18 Ω minutes) (2007), audiotape, which has become obsolete, is scanned and then reconfigured into a composite image that poses as an organized formal construction. No attempt is made to seamlessly merge the images. 18 Ω minutes was the amount of time that was erased from the Watergate tapes. Again, this reference has to do with the inaccessible, in this case, a mystery created through deletion. The tape itself is an object embedded with information-although displayed as a photograph-there is no way to access the information contained within the material. The viewers will have to construct their own images from nothing. The circular process and chain of references that Sisley employs share characteristics of Jorge Luis Borges' stories, which often involved ideas around infinity, mirrors, and labyrinths. In his 1962 short story The Circular Ruins, also the title of another of Sisley's series, a man attempts to dream a being into life only to realize at the end of the story that he himself is a mere figment of someone else's dream. In Sisley's The Circular Ruins (2007), a photographic image is destroyed-transformed into a black object that is then segmented, arranged, and scanned. The resulting image is then printed as a new photograph, ripped apart again, and re-assembled, and so on. Sisley's work would suggest an obsession with series and systems, perhaps interested in commenting about an illusion of certainty that either a system or record information appears to provides, whether a photograph, audiotape, or videotape. TS ROBERT TWOMEY UC SAN DIEGO Robert Twomey uses his body as a means of exploring spaces of interest around male identity, technology, and personal intimacy. In the Father-Daughter Art Show (2006), he produced a body of work around the idea of an imaginary daughter. It offers a dense set of associations that explore paternal desire and elicit uncomfortable associations about a 26-year-old male contemplating an imaginary young girl. However, the fiction of fatherhood provides a space to play out his need for intimacy and his desire to be a provider. In a further step towards exploring masculinity, One way to form a bond (2006) is the documentation of performance in which he lovingly coddled and kissed a rifle. It was another means for exploring a kind of bonding. Recent work on physical relationships has manifested itself in Seven Segment Display (2007), a light display composed of characters of the type found in digital alarm clocks. He has constructed these characters from four-foot fluorescent lighting units. The piece affords two levels of interaction--up close as a perceptual experience of light and electricity, in relation to the viewer's body, and from the distance as a textual communication. Twomey's work is a kind of cross between Bruce Nauman and Matthew Barney. Much of Nauman's work is characterized by an interest in language, which often manifests itself in a playful, mischievous manner. He utilized flashing neon for much of his language play work. Barney also explores masculinity in his work, often using petroleum jelly in contrast with sculptures and films having to do with sports, constructing iconic buildings, or war. Its amorphousness and bodily associations contradict the hard-body world of discipline and control. Nauman, Barney, and Twomey are all interested in the nature of communication and the inherent problems of language. TS NICHOLE VAN BEEK UC SANTA CRUZ Nichole van Beek's room-size installation The Island of Questionable Value (2007) is a meditation on the fate of Santa Rosa Island, off the coast of Santa Barbara. This island is an intersection of important historical moments and contemporary desires: it is now part of the national park system; it is a site of the Native American people, the Chumash, who lived there before European contact; the oldest human remains in the Americas have been discovered there; and the previous owners of the island still hold rights to retain non-native deer and elk on the island, and can charge people to visit and hunt game. Van Beek's installation explores this complicated history with an equally complicated aesthetic. At its center, she has constructed a half-dome structure with antlers screen-printed on fabric, which shelters a sleeping bag with fabric that depicts viscera. These visual indices of hunting sit in a fantastical, rocky landscape of plaster polygonal forms that have photos of Santa Rosa flora, cut and shaped to their multi-faceted surfaces. In a nod to the island's prior inhabitants, what appear to be Native American artifacts hang on the wall. On closer inspection, they suggest sculptures-on-a-stick, rather than ritualistic implements. Her work reminds me of the subtle, social commentary of Mark Dion's installations. He often re-creates the categorization and exhibition practices of museums in order to explore how a subjective understanding of nature becomes established as history by a particular group of people at a particular time. Similarly, Van Beek has worked with the tropes of display. In one gallery, she has a fantastical information booth with her own drawings and hand-made books about Santa Rosa island's history, along with instructions that direct the viewer to the location of the darkened world full of viscera and artifacts. TS CONCLUSION Above all, Compass 2007 has demonstrated the range, diversity, and excellence of practice inherent in the MFA programs within the University of California system, which was hoped for but could not necessarily be expected. Of perhaps greater significance was the range of media and unusual number of inventive singular strategies in the work that set it above what one is accustomed to seeing, suggesting that the spirit of research and genuine exploration is still thankfully very much alive in the UC system. If anything, this process has proven that California has retained its commitment to pursuing its own aesthetic vision and, while informed by the international style reflected in most regional centers and propagated by the glut of biennials, art fairs, and journals, is not necessarily directed by it. It appears that quirk rather than trend drives production in this part of world and is cultivated at the embryonic stage. Is it still valid to regard California as a frontier, outback territory, a place of exploration and re-invention? If so, is it this mythological and fictional identity that drives such idiosyncratic practice that sets it apart from other places? There is no doubt that the raw wild-west quality of the Southern Californian desert landscape, or edge-of-the-world sensation of the Northern Californian coastline has an impact on the psyche, perhaps providing the physical and mental space for re-imagination and the suggestion of endless possibilities. In addition, the juxtaposition of such extreme natural architecture with highly sophisticated art centers-Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego-lures exceptional artist faculty from around the world who are equally inclined to reinvent themselves. Still, California is by no means immune from the harsh cruelties, overt prejudices, and obvious enmity of the art world system. Compass 2007 is itself an illustration of art's competitive and exclusionary nature, a Darwinistic contest of critical strength where judgments are made that either deliver a triumphant knockout or devastating body-blow from which some artists may never recover. It is not our intention to be such arbiters. Ultimately, Compass 2007, which began as a survey, morphed into an unexpected celebration of the work of a few talented artists that resisted immediate diagnosis and divination and, by doing, so provided an enduring and inspiring vision of art across the State. CE