Penn State students can experience the "game" of painting at the MFA Graduate Thesis Exhibition tomorrow at Zoller Gallery.

Miles Halpern (graduate-painting) will be displaying about 20 works of art that resemble board games and other pop culture symbols through his exhibit titled Vagabond in Happyland.

"The paintings work like games or puzzles," Halpern said. "You can come up with different meanings about what is in the picture. It's an interpretation by the viewer."

Many of his paintings evolved from pictures that he took or found and then manipulated the environment in the photo, Halpern said.

The twists in his art put a new context to the picture and allow him to put different concepts and things together, he added.

"It is reality restructured," Halpern said. "The ideas reference reality, but they don't have the form or body of reality."

Halpern's work presents references to different things that viewers might recognize, he said.

This includes objects from pop culture, such as a dancing flower or a Rubik's Cube.

"[Viewers] might take pleasure in figuring out why the environment is different," Halpern said.

Some of Halpern's artwork is very large, reaching 8 to 12 feet in length and 6 feet in height. Halpern said he will use all of Zoller Gallery.

"The paintings are large, strange and funny just as much as they are thoughtful," Halpern said.

The exhibit is titled Vagabond in Happyland to represent the journey of life toward the goal of happiness, including his personal journey through the past two years.

"It deals with concepts of figuring out life," Halpern said. "A vagabond is always traveling, and he's always traveling towards happyland."

Mihail Tomescu, a recent graduate of the MFA program in painting, said he is a colleague and also a good friend of Halpern's.

He said Halpern has worked very hard on his paintings and his decorations are very complex.

"[Halpern] paces back and changes a lot of things until he realizes the point where things work, and it makes sense," Tomescu said.

Tomescu said the exhibit presents paintings as a contradiction between the idea of happyland.

He said happiness should be the target or the end of the life, and a vagabond, which is an unfulfilled person who doesn't know exactly where he or she is going, contrasts with this concept.

"He has something to communicate and his sense of composition is beautiful," Tomescu said. "It can be nourishing for young students to see well-done, complex work. Everyone can find his own position in the stories he tells."

Nathaniel Booth (graduate-painting) is also a colleague of Halpern's.

Booth said Halpern has a way of bringing childlike, endearing qualities to serious issues, such as corrupt politics and relationships ending through his art pieces.

"His work is painfully playful, distorted and absurd," Booth said. "At first, a painting strikes you as being simple like a board game, but after more time, it becomes more perplexing and disturbing."

Halpern's work allows you to enter inside his imagination, Booth said.

"It lets you step away from school and academia," Booth said. "You're enlightened to get into his weird little world and play around beside him."

The vagabond reference in the exhibition title refers to Halpern himself, Booth said.

He said Halpern is in most of his works, and he is a narrator as he travels through his work and thinks about what each painting represents.

"Follow him through what at first seems like happyland," Booth said. "Then it becomes hallucinatory. You want it to end just as much as you want to go for another ride."