As was the case last semester, the library is hosting an alumni art show. It excellently creates a space for the reading and study of both text and images. This semester, “Focus on Photography,” located on the ground floor, scans the creative relief of fine art photography, bringing to view various and distinct individual practices. Though the works vary immensely in both subject and process, the photographers share a common bond: all 17 hail from Biola’s art department.
Among them are two of the current art faculty, Kurt Simonson and Steve Childs. They are both artists whose photos exemplify the wide range of practices on display.
Simonson’s “Northwest Journals” take a more traditional approach, as the portrait-based pictures examine memories and personal connection to a specific location in his home state, Minnesota. Childs, on the other hand, explores boundaries of representational photography. His close-up shots of painted urban graffiti outbursts skirt along the lines of abstractions.
The wide gamut of art continues with more recent graduates. Angi Welsch, who graduated last May, displays a selection of her images from her senior thesis show, “Tend the Land.” Her lush, large-format portraits are of a large family toiling to cultivate a familial glade of protection and comfort, despite defiant odds and ruptured pasts.
Also within the sector of portraiture are the partitioned and reassembled works of Dustin Giallanza, also a 2010 graduate. His displays are from his senior show, “Constellate.” Starting with a fully intact portrait, the surface is then sanctioned into a myriad of small hexagons that are cut out then pinned together on Styrofoam board in configurations as faithful to the original as possible. What is left is a likeness lacking in small rhombuses of information, demonstrating the continual lack of cohesiveness in society, despite multitudes of networking technologies.
These are only a handful of artists selected for “Focus on Photography.” The disciplines it represents are fittingly displayed in a building that is dedicated to presenting and protecting a broad field of information and knowledge.
