More than Just for Art’s Sake, Westmont Student Artists Unveiled

‘Twelvefold’ Reveals a Dozen Art Student Seniors’ Varied Work at Westmont Museum of Art

Rebecca Steel's "Out of the Blue" | Photo: Josef Woodard

By a comforting routine of calendar clockwork, the tail end of the Westmont College’s academic year brings with it various traditions, including a group show at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art. It is the chance for senior art department students to publicly show their work in this respectable museum space, and generally, the exhibitions celebrate the vive la différence factor of each artist tending their own creative fires, unbound by common themes or materials.

With this year’s student art harvest, Twelvefold, the scale expands beyond the smaller number of artists in the past, along with the breadth of diverse vantage points and artistic means. As varied as the art is in this dozen-strong show, one notable commonality relates to a tendency of these young artists to explore sometimes frank, honest, and personal themes and issues through their art.

One may be tempted to read this openness with the sociopsychological influence of the pandemic on these inward-looking young twentysomethings who spent formative years in the thick of the virally turbulent period. Whatever the underlying forces, Twelvefold impresses with freshness of expression and the mirror-eye view of the examined self very much in progress.

Creed Bauman’s “A Tension, Please” | Photo: Josef Woodard

Such inward perspectives are encountered at the outset, in the museum’s long entryway gallery. Creed Bauman’s “A Tension, Please” consists of seven pieces of varied shape, organized in a symmetrical array around a key centerpiece, “Tension,” a large arch-shaped image of a semi-self-portrait of the artist engaged in a wrestling tangle with Jacob and the Angel — a story out of Genesis — with white wings dramatically protruding from the Angel’s back. Bauman describes the overall work as dealing with his “dueling identities as a Queer and a Christian.”

Across the room, Tucker Howard’s “Visual Reverb” consumes the long wall with its 18 square panels, abstract imagery ordered in rows identified as “INPUT” and “OUTPUT,” and linked to the artist’s being identified as ADHD. A synesthetic sound component, including electronica pieces created via the 18th-century technique of the Chladni plate, contributes to the complex yet neatly ordered conception and realization of his piece.

Installation art concepts comprise one running theme in the overall show, in distinctly different ways.

Tucker Howard’s “Visual Reverb” | Photo: Josef Woodard

In one gallery corner, a domestic setting replete with a love seat and throw rug, Rebekah Steele shows her self-portrait oil paintings — some faceless, implying a sense of morphing identity. In another corner, Mia Brooke’s friendly series called A Real Page-Turner finds a set of art books in another cozy reading nook within the main gallery. Opening the “books,” we find three-dimensional vignettes adorned by short quotations, the stuff of mermaids and Dorothy and Toto, too, with the ever-relevant homily “There’s no place like home.”

Mia Brooke’s “A Real Page Turner” | Photo: Josef Woodard
Mia Brooke’s “A Real Page Turner” | Photo: Josef Woodard

Home is a more complicated place and concept in Juliana Moore’s “Sanctuary,” taking the altered form of a giant Kern’s Guava Nectar juice box in the gallery — juice box as self-reflective shrine. Closer inspection of the box’s text reveals interwoven testimonials of internal questioning, as the artist grapples with issues of sexual orientation and existential grounding, the expected thought processes in the transitional stage in the life of a college student (and beyond).

From left: Juliana Moore’s “Sanctuary 1” and “Sanctuary 2” | Photo: Josef Woodard

Jaycee Felkins, “Typical” series | Photo: Josef Woodard

Sentimental and memory-encoded visions of home can also be found in Ryan Speight’s colorful, compact, and digital-graphics-tinged “Personal Pixels,” detailing locations around Santa Barbara. For Laurea Wanner, home means a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains, in the Eastern Sierras, and with her series of screen prints called Highway 395, she commemorates her childhood with odes to such humble landmarks as the Portal Motel and disused mining machinery in the ghost town of Bodie.

On the museum’s back walls, art of a more abstracted nature comes into focus. For Jaycee Felkins, her Typical series gamely blends imagery of the cosmos with manifestations of fear and uncertainty such as we experience in the immensity of the universe. Elsewhere, Amèlie Barrero’s “The Water We Swim In” contends with the pervasive natural element of water, emblemized as subtle, faint blur forms with meditative, mandala-like shapes.

In the unorthodox materials zone, Erika Harrison wins points for cheek and insight with her series Lackluster and the Wrecked, paintings of mythic, superhero, and vehicular iconography on auto parts. We’re naturally reminded of the Los Angeles–based “finish fetish” artist Billy Al Bengston (1934-2022), who used auto paint and parts in his work, but Harrison brings her own 21st-century spin to the ever-relevant theme of machine-driven life.

Erika Harrison’s “Lackluster and the Wrecked” | Photo: Josef Woodard
Erika Harrison’s “Lackluster and the Wrecked 2” | Photo: Josef Woodard

The spotlight turns more inherently inward with self-portrait series in the show, from Gray Mohon’s willfully diverse takes on the subject — distorted or oblique views, a vertebrae “portrait” and an ant’s-eye view — to Julia Jachetta’s set of large charcoal nude studies set amid the claustrophobic context of a checkerboard dreamscape. Jachetta writes about her use of this art to help channel lingering memories of a near-death experience as a child.

From left: Julia Jachatt’s “A Waiting Space 1” and “A Waiting Space 2” | Photo: Josef Woodard

All things and themes considered, Twelvefold lives up to its exhibition title, with its dozen disparate viewpoints and artistic personalities on view. Through the show, we are invited into the interior worlds of young, still-forming artists, with unusually open and insider views. In short, there is more than just “art for art’s sake” at stake here.

Twelvefold: Westmont College Graduate Exhibition 2025 is on view at Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art (955 La Paz Rd.) through May 3. See westmont.edu/twelvefold for more information.