KRISTIN ELVES/Arizona Daily Wildcat Studio art sophomore Robert Rutherford and theatre arts sophomore Melissa Turner examine "49 Moments" by Karyn Clark yesterday afternoon inside the Museum of Art. Clark is one of 15 artists featured in this year's Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition. The exhibition will be open to the public through May 5.

This is an anxious crowd of MFA candidates. You might be too, if there was the one event between you and a Master of Fine Arts degree.

At the University of Arizona Museum of Art and the Joseph Gross Gallery, graduate students from the MFA program exhibit their work in a variety of media.

The 15 students are nervous, but they are also determined. Take, for instance, Kevin DuBay, an MFA candidate who built a wall inside the University of Arizona Museum of Art to mount his work properly.

The candidates are persistent, like Zel Brook, who overcame cancer and left her career as an accountant to pursue fine arts.

They are improvisational, like Kimberly Gaul, who installed her fabric sculpture partly over the Joseph Gross Gallery's ceiling beams, or like Laddie Pepke, who created a series of small, seated figures in a variety of compromising positions.

Pepke described his series as a study of denial and anxiety within relationships. His "Figure Gazing" is unassuming enough, until he explains.

"Everybody says everything is OK (within relationships), but really you are sitting there with your pants down," he said. "The figure is bronze, which is an exalted material, but really there is nothing classy about a turd-looking figure sitting on a toilet."

In his work "Men on Poles," two small figures sit on small chairs hoisted 10 feet in the air. The tiny men sitting in their tiny chairs are spotlighted scarily in space.

"The figures (in my series) are all seated - that is about passivity, about sitting down for something when you should be active in your life," Pepke said.

Feelings of powerlessness are also evident in Brook's work "Snow Job," a self-styled management chart of glass globes with truisms from the corporate world inside each.

"It is an organizational chart," she said. "The phrases are from meetings, different work situations. One side says 'We nurture creativity;' the other says 'Follow policy.' Or on this globe, 'We care about people,' and the other side says 'Please stay on the line.'"

Meanwhile, next door at the Joseph Gross Gallery, curator James Schaub presents a space full of textures and neutral colors, with works that reveal much about the artists' state of minds.

"My friend remarked that this is the Obsessive Compulsive Room," said candidate Katie Monaghan of the gallery space.

But with her own meticulous prints, fellow candidate Kimberly Gaul's amorphous fabric forms, and others, the pieces have a certain consistency, both within each artist's series and the gallery as a whole. The pieces seem to be interrelated; there is nothing haphazard about the form or the follow-through.

Monaghan's work is a type of printing, made with rusty washers or railroad tracks and vinegar rather than ink and a press. Her work "redox fe203nh20" is a matrix of tiny circles, created when the washers rusted on the surface.

She finds the intricacy and precision of the artistic process critical and meditative.

"I like to make organized chaos," she said.

For all her painstaking set-up process, she said the final product is, in the end, beyond her control.

"(The outcome) really is a phenomenon; I can't predict the exact colors it will turn out, but I like the earthy browns and neutrals," she said.

For Gaul, the bright pink velour she bought at SAS Fabrics started her sculpture, "Pleasure." The not-quite-human-looking shade sprouts out of her huge sculpture in little suggestive bits.

"I just loved the fabric; I bought all of it," she said. "People really want to touch these pink nubbins."

The bits of pink are only as recognizable as the form itself.

"It is comfort versus discomfort - people react two ways usually: that it looks like dead bodies, or it looks like pillows," she said of the loosely but somewhat-menacingly piled form that seems to climb the Gross Gallery walls.

The exhibits will be in the Joseph Gross Gallery until May 5. The Joseph Gross Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.

The exhibits in The University of Arizona Museum of Art will be up until May 3. The Museum of Art is open Monday through Friday from, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday noon to 4 p.m.