Art of the People: The Annual Juried Student Show
Janet McCourt shows an icy landscape with “Sunset at the Rockies,” an acrylic on canvas. – Photos by John Cane III
May 5, 2004
As yet another semester at UMass Boston comes to an end, the art community has started to pick up the pace, preparing for the “art month” of May, Open Studios, lectures, and the juried student art show. The last is UMB’s way of showing off its best student work, chosen by a panel of judges out of all the pieces submitted for viewing at the Harbor Art Gallery.
Janet McCourt shows a split view of mountain vistas in “A Winter Night at the Rockies” and its companion piece below it, “Sunset at the Rockies.” Both have a lush, deep coloring that makes them bright even in the stillness of the acrylic harsh icescape. Simple in subject matter but complex in the shadowing, there is much to see in these two paintings.
“The Gray Gables at Danvers State Insane Asylum” is a hard-edged, black-and-white photograph of a Victorian-era house in disrepair. The broken windows and peeling paint seem more sinister than usual framed against a cloudy sky. Melissa Hardiman captured the mood of a place that once housed the criminally insane by using a monochromatic medium.
Nick Rubino takes liberties with an open shutter and a penlight, creating glowing, worm-like images surrounding a figure in his “Untitled” collection of photographs mounted on wood. Surrounding two large photos are 15 smaller pictures framing the pair with the same figure printed and posed in different ways, playing with smears of light and darkness.
The pointillist technique used by Shunsuke Mizumoto in his “Intertextivism” does not hide a picture within a picture (think “Mallrats”), so don’t spend a half hour trying to find one. It’s simply an interesting experiment using neighboring red and gray spheres with no particular pattern, resembling the shifting shades of a two-dimensional topographical map.
Kristin Olduch carved up her face for her “Self-Portrait.” Using different sections of a photo of her face, she encased one after another in Plexiglas sheets and put them together creating a layered, skewered look. In the center of the work is three-stage piece with an eye open and closed arranged in a triangular manner, creating an effect of almost slow motion, multi-depth movement.
The “Untitled (Interior)” is a pastel drawing done by Hallie Lee where the shadows loom large over a man at a desk being surprised by another man entering the room. What makes the perspective so interesting is that the angle is slightly skewed, as if you are looking from right over the shoulder of the man coming up the stairs at his work-absorbed companion bent over the desk.
There’s plenty of sculpture to choose from as well. “The Falling of Eve” by Vivian Chu is a cleverly named, allegorical wire apple referring to its fellow fruit from the Bible’s Tree of Knowledge. Mairim Kilmister’s wire-constructed “T-Rex” is just plain fun, resembling a monster straight out a ’60s sci-fi movie.
In addition to the metal flora and fauna are Anne-Marie Fallon’s “Untitled” plaster pieces, also shown in The Watermark under the name “Faces of Expectancy.” The quartet of pregnant, two-inch high figures, with their bulbous bellies and elongated torsos, resemble the Paleolithic, so-called “Venuses” or ancient fertility goddesses.
One of the most visually and texturally interesting pieces is John Manfredi III’s “A Form Where Forms Are Forms.” The entire composition is layer upon layer of acrylic nearly an inch thick. Shades of turquoise, lavender, and green streak through, depending on the angle of the light hitting it. Treated with a plastic coating, it seems almost glasslike until you notice the irregular, opaque surface that is more fragile than it first appears. At the artist’s request, it was kept away from natural light because it was painted under fluorescent light and he was unsure how sunlight would affect the way the piece was viewed.
Surprisingly enough, Wendy Baring-Gould, community outreach director for the UMass Boston sculpture park Arts On The Point, is also a student, taking a class with sculpture and drawing instructor Kitty Wales. Baring-Gould’s charcoal and pen piece, “Variations of the Horse’s Skull,” showed a collage of views of a horse’s skull. One of them demonstrates a frontal view of the thin, ossified ridge of a nasal bone while another traced the pathway of an artery.
The Harbor Art Gallery normally displays works from outside artists. This is the one event where a collection of the best the student body has to offer is on display. The juried student show runs through May 10 in the Harbor Art Gallery and is free to everyone.
