Arts & Life

From ordinary to outlandish

Students and faculty thronged around a tall, rectangular block made of rough, drab-dried clay material. To the inartistic eye, it’s just that. But to MFA sculptor Nick Gaby, it’s minimalist sculpture with infinite potential.

This week’s student art exhibit featured works that were not as outwardly abstract and engaging as last week’s interactive pieces. Most of the works in this week’s exhibit utilized materials and objects seen in everyday life to convey the artists’ own personal messages.

In Gaby’s artist statement, he said “minimalist artwork as we know it today, is my slightly conservative uncle who used to be hip back in the day.”

Instead of pinning his statement neatly on the wall like the other artists, he put it underneath a drop cloth folded in the corner of the room. Guests leaned over and read about his affinities with the block, including its minimally bothersome and generally safe characteristics.

“You can set your coffee on it while you tie your shoe or adjust your skirt and then you can stare at it and zone out,” Gaby said in the artist’s statement for his exhibit, “Block.”

The other exhibits were a little more vivid than his. The Dutzi Gallery was filled with work from a variety of printmaking students exhibiting their specialties in media. From detailed etching to the comic-book aesthetic of silk-screening, to monotype and reduction woodcut.

The majority of the pieces are vividly colored, some blatantly humorous and some political statements. There were multiple depictions of “Breaking Bad’s” Brian Cranston accompanying a silkscreened image of Batman pleading for Ben Affleck to not portray him in the next Batman film.

Other artists such as Patricia E. Rangel explored materials and processes, like the other exhibits, creating from quotidian objects. By using both natural and manmade materials she created three-dimensional structures molding the two.

“Stripping the information to line, shape and form provides the framework for transformation into a three-dimensional piece,” Rangel said in her artist’s statement.

The Gatov Gallery featured multiple works of Arezoo Bharthania contrasting the difference between her “inside” and “outside” lives in Iran. She said that she reflects various aspects of her memory in the works, depicting her personal life in either setting.

She made the contrast clear, adding household materials such as magazine clippings, curtain material and thread to her depictions of the indoors while paintings of the outdoors powerfully illustrated different states of a forest, in multiple stages, from pristine to foggy to enflamed.

“I show the interaction between the two contrary, hence integrated experiences of my life and the way they affect each other … my work is an indication of … how those contrary sides of my social experiences are merged,” Bharthania said in her artist’s statement.

In graduate student Anjuli Subramanian’s exhibit “Flowers for Alice,” she took influences from Victorian scrollwork to create metallic tributes to each of her nine deceased pets.

She said that portrait minis were a popular design during the Victorian era, so different portraits of each of her pets are placed in the center of the embellished pieces. She said that there would eventually be 22 pieces in total, including fish, dogs, cats, rabbits and guinea pigs.

These works and more will be on display in the Fine Arts student galleries between the FA buildings until Thursday.

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