When you enter the on-campus art gallery, your first move will likely be to simply stand in the center of the room and take it all in. As Biola’s Art Department continues to celebrate its 35th anniversary, the second alumni art display currently available for viewing in the gallery is an eclectic sensory overload of the achievements of past art majors.
It seems that no form of art, materials or themes were left uncovered. This could be the only minor complaint of the exhibit, as it possesses no central spine that links all the art pieces together, except that they are all works of past students. However, what this merely means is that the individual pieces require more time and deliberation; this is one art exhibit that encourages the viewer to keep looking.
Adorning the walls of the gallery is a vast mixture of different paintings and drawings. Tom Steck’s oil paintings mix portraiture with landscape and contrast the seemingly unfinished drawings of Mark Fredericks and Danny Simons that invoke the imagination.
Recent Biola alumni Oliver Walker and Adam Sjoberg break away from the more traditional forms of art with some three-dimensional pieces. Walker’s installation piece that creatively involves a stuffed bird will immediately draw the eye, as will Sjoberg’s “The Hands that Touch the Lips that Tell Us We are Whole,” a tiled piece of artwork with mythical themes. Sjoberg’s “Things Fall Apart,” a massive tiled tree, is in display in the adjoining room as well, one of the mightier pieces from his senior art show of the year before. The works of these more recent alumni, which also include the creative work of Laurel Dailey and Jamie Uretsky, are proudly displayed alongside the work of alumni from five, 10 and even 15 years ago.
“I was greatly honored to be a part of this alumni show and have my artwork in the same gallery as former Biola undergrads, such as Zach Klein and Paul Loya, as well as members of my graduating class, such as Jamie Uretsky,” said Walker.
One of the more unique exhibits is that of 1991 Biola grad, Jennifer Hanen, whose current project, Aroundireland.net, seeks to capture the essence of Ireland using solely video and photos captured on mobile phones. Other forms of media expression are also on full display, including the surreal projection of Rebecca Burghart, entitled “Mircrowave,” and a media presentation by John Calley, called “Cars vs. Houses,” which involves projected images inside a miniature wood frame of a house.
There could be lists and lists of the unique facets of all the art displayed in the gallery, but there are just too many works. The Art Department has done an admirable job of including alumni from all years and covering all different types of artwork, and it is sure that everyone who visits the exhibit will find something to interest them.
“A Sense of Time and Place” is currently on display in the art gallery until Oct. 4.
