Drawing on Student Talents and Concepts

Among the three annual student art exhibitions showing up this time of year at Westmont College, Santa Barbara City College and UCSB, SBCC brings on the most generous doses of varietal spice. It is partly a matter of numbers, given the inherently diverse pool of SBCC art students compared to Westmont’s modest senior art class and the intentionally limited group of UCSB MFA candidates.

As expected, this year’s student art exhibition at SBCC’s Atkinson Gallery is rich with diversity — of skill levels, mediums, and artistic intentions. But the show, organized by gallery director John Connelly, manages to avoid the piled-high, traffic jam syndrome of some past student shows here. Thanks to judicious use of gallery space and installation logic on the walls and on the sculpture-crowded floor space, the viewing is more inviting than overwhelming.

Thematic- and medium-based grouping helps in the clarifying process. This selection, for instance, is well-populated with charcoal and other drawing works, linked to the “Fundamentals of Drawing” class. Young artists come to the drawing tradition from different angles, from the detailed and intricate mesh of Victoria Mejia Vega’s suitably titled “Dreamy,” to the soft-edged and almost retro-futurist vision of Molly Tooley’s “Abstract Charcoal.” Tooley’s M.C. Escher–like sketchy piece “Shadow Box” celebrates its own spatial illogic of staircases going … somewhere.

Manipulating forms is also key in Chelim (Alice) Lee’s “Light Play,” with its smoothly conical and geometric shapes converging in an imagined space. Lizzy Rosales nudges her way into the art-about-art realm with “Studying Hands,” with its varied sampling of hand studies, from crisply drawn hands to a prismacolor mock-glove effect and, for irrational juxtaposition, a melting hand.

Eyeballs are the thing and the operative focus in Austin Meszaros’s acrylic on canvas painting “Seeing Blue.” Here we have a psychedelic fantasy vision, in which detached eyeballs become our sensory receptors in some gravity-defying tunnel dimension. Coming back to earth and very close to home in Elyssa Crutchfield’s warmly observed and compositionally graceful untitled oil on canvas painting, the subject is literally in the building: the clay zone at SBCC’s art department in this vast ship-shaped building. Crutchfield coaxes elegance and awareness from a presumably “mundane” scene, but one invested in artistic ambience.

This year’s student art harvest is particularly strong in the three-dimensional art department, and generally in terms of work which busts molds (so to speak) and suspends our expectations. “Yawatxivan,” by the artist known as Luna, serves as an unintentional centerpiece in the gallery, imbued with an indigenous mysticism reflected in a bust festooned with colorful feathers. Nearby, the artistic point of focus returns to hands in the form of Allessio Trevisan’s multi-handed mutant sculpture called “Decamani.”

In one corner sits Lucia Rodriguez Clemente’s dry-witted “Can,” a construction of dogmatically and vividly orange-colored cans, wire, iron, and fabric with an effect of Pop Art revisited and rethought with a 21st century mind. In the literal opposite corner of the Atkinson gallery, the anomaly of Dain Hollis’ “Sleep” lounges, languid and bittersweet. The lumpy figure, made from reclaimed fabric, stuffing, nails, and wood, embodies disembodiment while its protruding nails suggest acupuncture in reverse. 

“Sleep” is just one of the distinctive characters and sneakily subversive features of a student art show which handily transcends art of the dryly academic variety. Suffice to say, there are plenty of reasons to make one’s way up to the idyllic and scenically endowed Atkinson before the show closes, on May 10.

See gallery.sbcc.edu for more information and gallery hours.