<em>S</em><em>TASIS</em>, the second feature of the fourth-year fine arts exhibit, was shown Nov. 2-6 at the Artery Gallery in East Campus Hall. The show exhibited a variety of art pieces such as paintings, photographs, and video installations. </p>
Paintings of the human body were present, which included Us, a narrative series by Lenore Ramirez. Ramirez’s oil paintings deal with narrative via skin.
“I like dealing with a lot of scars, wrinkles, stretch marks … and I like my art to be more textural and deal with finding the beauty in something normally grotesque,” said Ramirez. These paintings are of enlarged, abstract shots of people, looking at specific parts of the body and creating a narrative about the person.
Photographs found in the exhibit showed varying usage of the medium. Sam Mellick’s photograph and resin pieces are an example of an interesting use of photography. It uses the resin to give the photograph a 3D effect. Another photography piece found in the exhibit is The Pursuit of Shyness by Laura Arendoque, where three photos create a narrative involving a woman unravelling a long rope through a forest.
Between the paintings and photographs were sculptures and installations. One of the installations was Redefined, by Julia Martin. Redefined took everyday objects, such as a cup, a plate, and a fork, and fragmented them. During the exhibit, Martin used these fragmented objects for their originally intended purposes.
The exhibit also featured two video installations in the projection room. Milk teeth is a glitch video installation by Melissa Johns that deals with the imperfection of human memory. “Even if you try your hardest, there’s going to be sense data that gets filtered out immediately and afterwards fades, and so I’m interested in mimicking that physical processes by using the visual aesthetic of glitch art,” Johns said. The video used stereoscopic channels to film a dancer performing while a broken soundtrack plays, creating a sad atmosphere.
The other video, Rhythm, by Eleonara Shteynle, showed clips of the outdoors with a transparent pattern that distorted the video. The transparent foreground is distorted as if the viewer is looking through a glass window.
“STASIS and FLUX provide an extremely good sense of the artist’s direction of their body of work that will culminate in a year -end exhibition in 2016,” commented Ramirez.
