The exhibition, which opened on Tuesday and will run until June 19, is the culminating experience for this year's 25 senior studio art majors and represents the diversity of interests and tastes within the graduating class of artists.
"First and foremost to remember is that each person's work reflects their individual ideas and what they would like to communicate visually," Brenda Garand, chair of the studio art department, said. "It has to do with the thinking process that they've been going through throughout their four years here."
The diversity within the senior class of art majors could not be better displayed in this exhibit. Alongside the sculptures, paintings, prints and photographs lining the walls and floor, one unassuming video on repeat is projected onto the ceiling in one of the farther corners of the room. This projection, titled "Flying, swimming, sometimes falling" by Nuith Morales '11, is a stop-motion video of birds in flight and goldfish swimming and bouncing around. Morales used pastel and gouache on paper and transparencies to draw each frame for this piece.
In the Strauss Gallery, adjacent to the Jaffe-Friede, is a piece by Sophie Shin '11 titled "Accumulation of Patterns (32 Days)." This seemingly simple work turns into a world of intriguing designs on closer inspection it is a swirl of dust stuck to one piece of paper. This piece won one of the Class of 1960 Office of Residential Life Purchase Awards, an award sponsored by the class of 1960 that acquires works for display in residential halls and other College buildings.
Other artists had slightly bigger ideas for expressing themselves. Ellie Hunter '11, who is concentrating in architecture, has three sculpture pieces showing in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery. "Studies in Space, #1" and "Studies in Space, #2" expand upon minimalist design through small details that interact with light and angles. The first piece incorporates wires connected to the walls and to rings, forming triangular holes that Hunter filled with mesh wire, wax paper or nothing at all. This translucent canopy both softens the light behind it and brings the viewer into a different world when standing under it.
"I really liked the way architecture combined fine art and design but also a lot of social and kind of more anthropological factors," Hunter said. "I liked the parameters of having to synthesize a lot of different elements in the process of creating the design, like having to consider environment and material."
"Studies in Space, #2" is composed of plaster sculptures arranged in rows on the wall, simple yet nuanced enough to look like giant pieces of origami. Hunter's third piece hangs from the ceiling near the entrance to the gallery. "Origins Inorganic" shows grass growing upside down from wax, which is connected to wires and suspended it in mid-air.
"The grass is kind of about the imperfection of dreams and memories, or kind of conscious and sub-conscious thoughts, things that belong but not exactly the way that we see them," Hunter explained.
The works of another architecture student, Max Van Pelt '11, also arrest attention. His two sculptures, "Visceral Artifice" and "Elephant's Buttress," bring together metal, wood and concrete in visually striking combinations of curves and points. The first occupies a significant portion of one side of the gallery floor, with a sharp metal point ominously facing the entrance.
"I started working on some of my first really big sculptures that were bigger than I was a few weeks before work selection, and I've been sort of living in the metal shop," Van Pelt said. "It's like totally different to get to see your piece in a room that's big enough for your piece, so I'm super excited about it."
One recurring theme in the exhibition is the reinterpretation of material many students explored the use of common household items, manipulating them in different ways to create a certain effect. In "Walk Lightly as a Lotus Blossom," Shirley Hu '11 incorporates red Chinese envelopes that are crunched up and hanging from wires or lying flat under stacks of Plexiglas. Her piece "The Process" takes a slightly more somber tone, as she uses stripped lamp cord resembling a fishing net or grey hair hanging from the wall.
"I just really like working with materials, kind of manipulating and transforming everyday objects," Hu said. "My stuff has to do with repetition and the process itself, so sculpture really ties in well with that because it opens up an entire new world."
