Biola alumni students opened their fifth and final Art Alumni Exhibition starting this past Tuesday, Feb. 26, and it will be on display until Thursday, March 20. The opening reception was on Tuesday from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

The theme, “Through a Glass Dimly,” focuses on spiritual and religious themes in art, and the works of the participants, such as Jonathan Anderson, exhibits this. Anderson, now serving in his second year as a full-time professor at Biola began teaching after completing his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from CSU Long Beach. His paintings, which center on how visual language is functioned, illustrates a “seemingly realistic ‘space’ opened up by the representation,” a space with “genuine depth” such as a chapel or a landscape. This space, however, seems closed up by the fact that the ‘space’ is only “representational” rather than being “an actual one.”

Anderson believes it is “vital that we speak about God” and that the necessity to continue “speaking and struggling to articulate” in theological language is also important. He is now very pleased to see his fellow alumni begin their new journeys with art outside of Biola.

“I’m looking forward to seeing … how they have been grappling with life through the medium of the visual arts,” Anderson said.

Kurt Simonson, who graduated in 2000 and taught high school photography for three years, received his MFA degree from Long Beach State and is currently serving as the assistant professor of photography at Biola. In addition, Simonson has been a part of all five of the alumni art shows in many various ways. However, in the most recent one, Simonson’s photography was chosen by Art Director Barry Krammes, just like it was during the second exhibition.

Simonson’s photography in this exhibition includes “diptychs” — two-panel scenes that “juxtapose fractions of old religious paintings with photographs from everyday life.” Simonson says he strives to indicate the “tensions” and “complexities” in life, asking questions such as, “Are contemporary scenes made more ‘sacred’ because of the presence of the religious scenes or vice versa?”

Brieanna Radford, however, will graduate this May. During fall 2006, Radford completed her studies at the New York Center for Arts and Media Studies (NYCAMS), where she first started on her piece, “The Meditation Box.” Radford was then asked to display a piece, “concerning the necessity for mediation in spiritual health.” Impressed by this piece, Krammes believed it would fit well with the show. “The Meditation Box” involves the “spiritual discipline of meditation in spiritual growth,” according to Radford. She said Christians need moments of silence, but that they often “shy away” from them due to the “emphasis” that Buddhism places on meditation. Therefore, Radford’s “Meditation Box” is created in order to “provide a space to pursue that silence” and also to “provoke thought of the hunger for meditation in daily spiritual life.”

As the alumni commence their fifth and last art exhibition, Biola continues to look forward to more projects of their students to display and “impact the world” with the gifts God has granted them.