The undergraduate student exhibition is well underway at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. An annual tradition for over twenty years, the exhibit aims to present a variety of work coming out of our visual arts department. This year’s installment culminates in the group show “Green/Verte,” a title chosen to represent their emerging status as artists.
Curated by the students themselves, the show includes a variety of media, including photography, video installations and oil on canvas. The presentation is diverse, light-hearted and playful, as illustrated by Andrew Duncan Finlayson’s humorous, larger-than-life, cropped photo of “Chicken Feet.” As expected, there is some excellent work coming out of our visual arts department.
In a project philosophy majors will appreciate, Cal Crawford confirms his theory of a “Closed Universe” with a paper trail that would impress an Ottawa bureaucrat. Crawford displays his “evidence” in a series of photographs (cracked sidewalks, ravaged libraries, broken windows) along with letters of correspondence from leading astrophysicists who have, one-by-one, shrugged off his theory – thereby proving it (the Dean of Bath University would be happy to know that his mean-spirited comments, elevated to the status of Art, are now encased in Plexiglas on the walls of our gallery).
In an audio-visual presentation, Mark Andre Pennock’s three untitled portraits – blurred, motion-shot pictures, taken at haphazard angles – accompany headsets through which the viewer is able to better access the photo. Using the headset, the listener is intimated with the individuals in the portraits as they confide various personal problems in a resolve towards self-diagnosis. The soundtrack is effective in that it plays with time and narrative, working to further the photo’s dynamic gestures.
Working in the genre of Cindy Sherman, Alana Riley takes herself as both model and maker in three photographs taken from a series of her encounters with strangers. Posing up-close-and-personal with “Stephan, Tannis and Damien,” all people she does not know, Riley poses in a variety of amusing ways, distracting herself from the curious m
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