Having spent a good many Thursdays of late attending critiques with the upper years of McMaster’s Studio Art program, I was very much looking forward to seeing what this year’s graduates would present at the always-packed-but-seldom-boring Summa Exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art. Between those crits and various of their showings as Show and Tell Gallery on James North, I walked in with a solid expectation of who would show what, and in some cases I was right, but it was even better to be proven wrong by a few exceptional cases.

The stand-out winner for greatest leap forward would have to be Jennifer Torosian, to whom I should apologize for the sub-standard photo of her wonderful fabric work. I blame the bustling crowd - sure, there probably was room to swing a cat in the gallery, but lots of people would have lost an eye in the attempt.

After a good many crits of seeing Torosian present elaborate, brightly-coloured drapings and knotting of jersey fabric at her crits, it was remarkable to see her sublimate all these experiments down to a single elegant piece that has gained in gravitas by being far more transformative than her previous works. The ephemeral quality of the torn passages in the single piece are far more delicate than one would expect to achieve from a fairly cheap textile, while the large scale of the thing - nearly floor to ceiling - lends it the illusion of a weighty, almost psychological significance.

The other strength of Torosian’s piece is that it has no clear analogue to itself among her peers, which proved a rare instance in this graduating group. Elements tend to echo themselves among students working in close quarters at the best of times, and the grouping of particular works in the show made these accidents all the more apparent. The dark-room portion of the show in the Panabaker Gallery (and anyone who’s ever been in a degree show knows full well the agonies of choosing lighting in these situations) has resulted in an especially uncanny conjunction of works that seem almost deliberate in their penchant for glowy goldish objects lit from the inside. It’s a magical space, but certainly not individualistic for any of the artists involved.

Even in the Sherman Gallery, aesthetically similar works repeatedly sat alongside each other in combinations that were likely intended to generate a dialogue but could just as easily devolve into a pissing contest between works - placed in such close quarters, Alanna Young’s sedate assemblage of botanical elements couldn’t quite hold its own against the towering strength of Bernadette Funk’s The One on the Left. Carlos Granados-Ocon’s quartet of panels (above) is similarly situated with like-minded peers but manages to salvage its own voice by selecting out the most restrained of his many paintings and letting them converse amongst themselves instead.

Karli Strohschein is another remarkably self-assured artist in this group, one with a truly monstrous work ethic who has progressed steadily towards her dazzling installation of countless ceramics clustered around a tiled structure not unlike some of David Altmejd’s early work. The truly promising element of her strange tableau is the great potential for refinement and expansion in the work - it’s a brilliant start, but could definitely go even further.

For all that expansive success in Strohschein’s work, there are also artists in this group whose deft touch and modest interventions show incredible maturity. Chantal Laurendeau’s paired canvases are heavily charged by the relatively light plucking of threads that join their two figures together and obliterate their mouths with a disturbing demand for silence. It’s a slightly disquieting and utterly compelling work achieved with remarkably minimal means.

Of a similar vein is Sasha Klein’s drawings, particularly these two untitled works shown alongside her simple line drawings of switchblades with text. All are evocative works, though her circle-rendered forms are especially suggestive of bodies suspended in scientific discourse among other things. The only real flaw in her presentation was the lamentably small space in which her drawings were tightly grouped in a grid when they would have benefitted greatly from the luxury of breathing room, though I remain hopeful that Klein and her peers will find opportunities to show their work in better circumstances in future.

‘Play Nice’ is on view at the McMaster Museum of Art until April 25. The standard Artist Talk has already taken place in the time it’s taken me to write this, but there will also be a collaborative talk presented by some of the artists in collaboration with students from Engineering on Thursday, April 23 at 12:30pm.

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