Looking at student art is like watching Pee Wee football, or listening to a middle school orchestra — we take a certain pride in our own ability to tolerate the experience.
Leaving the gallery or field or middle school auditorium, one feels liberated, even a little superior for having survived with dignity and grace, and without suffering serious injury. Sensory and intellectual faculties appear to be functioning properly; our faith in human potential is shaken, but not shattered. We even maintained decorum in the comic face of grave sincerity. We didn’t laugh when the players reeled or stumbled.
Student art shows are typically relegated to little seen local venues near the school — undergraduate common areas, cafeterias, well lit and uncomfortable library lobbies. Sometimes paintings and sculpture by students will venture to more public arenas like the airport, a bank lobby or the museum basement. In the real world, the work usually looks vulnerable, and we feel a little ashamed for putting it out there in harm’s way. Seeing a student’s work in the grownup world is like watching the little drummer boy marching on the battlefield – he’s gonna get hurt.
But not always. This is the first student art show I’ve ever seen that failed to draw a single smirk or derisive snort out of me — I was pleasantly robbed! The painters and sculptors from the UNCC Studio Art Department deserve this public showing in NoDa. Studio Art Professors Roy Strassberg and Maya Godlewska curated Mud. Dust. Paint. Clay, works by their undergraduate art students. The exhibit can be seen by appointment through January 15 at the Hart Witzen Gallery on 36th Street.
Neither Pablo Picasso nor Andrew Wyeth is here. This is a varied amalgamation of students working out their own styles in the cauldron of University studios; these are diamonds, granite and coal in the rough. There are near misses and country mile misses. But still the show is exceptional, apparently the happy confluence of two exceptionally dedicated teachers and a bumper crop of talent. Sometimes the stars align with the full moon perfectly, and the tide rises unexpectedly to tickle our toes. Roll up your trousers.
Jason Mullis is a painter who brings energy, joy and vision to his canvas. Nothing is lost in translation. His oversized canvas, inappropriately sized in both square footage and punch for Charlotte’s living room walls, needs the big stage. In a show heavy on abstract painting, Mullis is the clearest direct descendant to the early 1950s school of American Abstract Expression. Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline and Willem DeKooning are his daddies. (Yeah, yeah, I know De kooning wasn’t American by birth, but wake up! See the painting? All-American.)
Mullis is American in spirit and extraterrestrial in subject. His paintings are celebrations of ancient gods of fertility, war, abundance, grace. They’re manifestations of his explorations of creativity icons populating the mythology of Hindi, Japanese and Buddhist traditions. That’s the spiritual fire behind the fervent reds and lime greens, the blocks of color and deftly crude outlines of black paint. Power infects his paint. It’s like watching a possessed violinist make beautiful and terrible music.
Sculptor Brandon Earl Boan hangs twisted rebar, welded and rusted railroad detritus and chunky ceramic forms from the gallery trusses with steel cables. Suspended ceramic orbs are roughly glazed and extend out into the room like bulky beehives stuck on steel lances. Boan wrestles rawness and heft into balanced weightlessness, achieving the effect of tutu clad lumberjacks strung from fish line and twisting in the wind.
In the middle of the gallery is a linen scroll twirling up to the rafters. “Say Your Prayers” is by Charlotte Zweber. It is both sculpture and painting, a mixed media litany of heaven-sent prayers. Words and images are written, rubbed, scribbled and painted on the surface, woven together on stitched pieces of cloth. Objects litter the floor under the ascending canvas vortex — leaves, dirt, reflective steel plates — missives not destined to make the trip. Zweber’s piece is the primitive cry of a spiritual toddler clamoring for the right words, poking around for the right path. It serves as a personal mission statement for Zweber and a metaphor for the entire show.
Laura McCarthy’s work “I The Unrelenting Whisper of Trees” illustrates the value of planned accidents. These unframed screen wire panels hang from the rafters a few feet from the gallery wall. Embedded in the screen wire is clotted, dribbled and dripped wax whipped and spun across the surface. Track lights from the rafters cast shadows on the wall behind the screen. The shadow on the wall is a phantom of the wax and screen, the immaterial impression of light and dark more alluring than the piece alone.
“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche… is advised to abandon exact science and wander with his heart through the world.” — Carl Jung
Art Department Chair Roy Strassberg and associate professor Maya Godlewska have successfully tapped this collective’s unconscious. Both instructors’ influence on these students is explicitly and implicitly without question. “Committed” and “dedicated” and “passionate” were the most common words used by students when I asked them to describe their teachers. “Plugged-in” and “demanding” were runners-up.
Their influence extends beyond Strassberg’s and Godlewska’s encouragement. A likely unconscious but irrefutable transfer of method and style is conferred to the students. The necessary, productive game of follow the leader is played here. Every student artist will mimic or emulate or assimilate the work of his or her teacher during the learning process. The lucky (or smart) students follow the right ones and know when to let go.
Painters Ana Ayala and Katie Stein borrow aesthetic sensibilities from their teacher. Surface matters to Godlewska, and these two have taken up that torch. Ayala uses surface textures to explore silent and dark issues of loss, oppression and the possibility of reprieve. Stein’s surfaces are planes of figure/ground exploration and dissolution, and experiments in saturated, sometimes dissonant, colors.
Alaya applies washy dark paint to canvas in an apparent attempt to conjure recognizable forms or messages. Signs emerge — letters, numbers, names, a child’s face.
Gravity pulls the paint down, blacks and browns merge to white, vapors coalesce into entrails. The paintings ooze a sense of dread. Though her subjects are elusive, the emotion is explicit and wrenching. The paintings ache with palpable sorrow.
If Alaya paints wakes, Stein paints festivals. Stein is indebted to Abstract Expressionist painters, but she hedges her bets with figuration — a man walking, a house, a woman’s body — planted in her canvases. The figures are fused within an organic matrix of colors flung, dropped and whipped across the surface. It’s over-the-top Jackson Pollock, and the overriding effect is frenzy. Some like it dizzy; I do not.
Bradlee Hicks embodies what is best about this show. His ceramic sculpture “Adventure With a One-Eyed Lady” fuses an idiosyncratic and original mythology with a deft and delicate use of disparate materials to produce an unexpected stab of wonder. His lady stands on a single steel robotic leg. Her torso ascends through mutations of heads blossoming lotus-like from head to head, her crowning glory a tiny child’s face emerging from a TV vacuum tube. The infant’s eyes peer out across his cosmos from his statuesque seven-foot perch. Hicks described Professor Strassberg as “a little demanding.” Now he can thank him.
Mud. Dust. Paint. Clay will be on exhibit at the Hart Witzen Gallery, 136 E. 36th St. in NoDa, through January 15. For more info, call the gallery at 704-334-1177.
This article appears in Dec 22-28, 2004.
