In the Galleries - 2012 MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

This year's graduates from Washington University's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will try any medium — from figurative and abstract painting to sculpture to installation to video. They think big, too: A litter of paper-pulp dogs (Katie Millitzer) huddling in an entryway functions as a leitmotif, the pale pooches reappearing in clusters throughout the exhibit, a wry riff on that art-school rite of passage, the "crit." Other highlights abound: a totem to hoarding by Marie Bannerot McInerney that makes a sculpture of consumer junk, complete with a shrink-wrap finish. For her enigmatically elegant Like a Trophy, Whitney Loren Wood cordons off a corner lined with linoleum tile, low-hanging fluorescent lights and a scattering of curious objects, including a broom and a clear box containing a red velvet cushion. Kathleen Perniciaro deconstructs soccer — a dangling white net, a dry-erase board with plays diagrammed on it, a swatch of artificial turf, a video of a soccer ball repeatedly crossing a chalked line — and renders the world's most popular sport as abstract formalism. Emily Squires creates an immersive response to Hillary Clinton's 2011 pro-LGBT speech in Geneva, enlarging the text of Clinton's address and annotating it in red ink to (literally) underscore Clinton's call for universal human rights. Squires provides a stack of postcards bearing the unmistakable image of Clinton's speechifying lips, inviting viewers to send their own comments to the Secretary of State via a mailbox covered in gold glitter. Through August 6 at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Forsyth & Skinker boulevards (on the campus of Washington University); 314-935-4523 or www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. daily (closed Tue., open till 8 p.m. Fri.). [Also exhibiting work are Ifeoma Ugonnwa Anyaeji, JE Baker, Natalie Baldeon, E. Thurston Belmer, Lauren Cardenas, Megan Sue Collins, Adrian Cox, Maya Durham, Erin Imena Falker, Jieun Kim, Howard Krohn, Robert Long, Nikki McMahan, Michael T. Meier, Reid G. Norris, Jamie Presson Wells, Andrew James Woodard and Kelly K. Wright.]