Fiber optics, styrofoam, kernels of rice, and asphalt. These are just some of the inventive materials that make up the student art work on view now in the Walsh Art Gallery in the show “Sensibilities.”
The exhibit is a pleasant surprise due to both its originality and overwhelming young talent. The works cover a wide range of materials and mediums and leave the viewer marveling at the fact that all of these artists are still students, many of whom are either studio art majors or minors.
One stand out piece that greets the viewer right away is Jocelyn Battista and Jennifer Pasciucco’s “Art Car.” From a few steps back this piece looks so credible that one wonders how on earth they got a real car into the Walsh Gallery.
However like all good art, all is not exactly as it seems and what looked like metal is really cardboard. The “Car” is expertly painted and assembled and its integrity comes from the use of “the hatch, lights, and tire of a Volkswagen Rabbit,” Battista said. After their hack sawing was complete and the initial frame constructed the two artists “installed Christmas lights to create the illusion of brakes and blinkers.”
The finishing touches of bumper stickers and an art filled windshield result in a piece that is both real yet fantastical, and ultimately forces the viewer to contemplate the ordinary in a new way.
Another construction heavy piece that was also constructed by Battista and her partners Elizabeth Cooper and Caitlin Curran was “Art Box.” This piece had a Jackson Pollack like feel and was created by water balloons with different colored paint being dropped onto a nail covered piece of wood and then exploding. Battista said that “the weight from the paint and the fall created enough force for the balloons to pop on the nails making the paint splatter.”
After the paint dried the artists then reconstructed the box inside out to reveal the paint splattered inside, the result is a piece that is both highly original and one that forces the viewer to think about the process of the art as well as the art itself.
Construction seemed to be the process on many of the student artist minds as is further evidenced by Tony DelMonico’s large plaster sculpture that reinterprets Michelangelo’s “David.” The classic masterpiece received many alterations within Tony’s reworking with its exploded head being the most notable. He also added computer parts which “serve as a metaphor for modernity and in particular our increasing dependence on technology in society.”
DelMonico views his new “David” as “a witness from a world that has long departed” and as one step in his struggle “to define myself in a modern artistic sense while also improving my understanding of materials.”
One piece that was self constructed- literally- was the performance piece by John Evans that featured him sitting in the gallery typing while surrounded by paint splattered papers and keyboard. Of his installation Evans said “the art is me making other art- my writing- the art will grow as I sit here and therefore the piece will grow.” Evans self created environment wonderfully captures that harried feeling one has when they are still frantically typing that ten page paper at two am while guzzling coffee and dreaming up excuses for their professor.
One piece that delves into abstraction even further than Pasciucco’s Chinese food container is Alisha Mai’s work entitled “Returning to a New Dimension made up of Lines, Repetition, Color and Exploration.” The work is a compilation of 122 four by six inch panels which are displayed in a grid pattern.
Mai says that her work “plays with the viewers sense of perception, and asks is what they really see there?” Mai arranged the grid so that “when the viewer distances themselves far enough a small dark dot will appear on the wall between every fourth panel.” Although line and color are the dominate forces within this work, the intensive time and energy that this piece must have taken are also evident.
One artwork that was certainly directly related to Fairfield University was Katherine Quell and Kristen Blicharz’s site-specific piece called “Parking Space.” Quell said that the piece was intended to be “a political statement to draw attention to the growing parking problem on campus. The number of students on campus continually grows, yet the number of parking spaces diminishes.”
The work is actually a photo of a construction done earlier. The “parking space” is located outside the loading dock of Loyola Hall and much like the “Art Car” plays with what is real and what is the artist’s construction. They went as far as using a blue faculty parking sign to give validity to their project yet “it is located in an obscure area where no one can drive on to it.” Thus this installation creates a spot that is ultimately useless, much like the promises of the administration to fix the consistent parking problem.
Illusion verses reality was a theme present not only within this artwork, but throughout the entire exhibit. Further, the sheer amount of ingenuity, talent, and creativity that is currently on display at the Walsh Art Gallery is amazing and an event not to be missed by any student on this campus. Art draws communities together and the beautiful and thought provoking objects our peers have created are more than deserving of our attention and our admiration.
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