Shay Church, Elephant, 2008
This year's highlights include Shay Church (San Jose State University), whose reclining elephant made from scavenged clay is cadaverous and yet strangely emotive. Though representational, Church's sculpture is mainly a form of land art, made from raw earth that the artist has labored to transport into the gallery in the tradition of Smithson's non-sites.
Stephanie Beck, Dencity, 2008
Stephanie Beck (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) uses cut paper as an architectural material to build monochromatic landscapes that reflect the complexity of urban space. Some of her surfaces are built up to approximate buildings, while others are cut away to suggest the spidery lattices of our patterns of movement.
Vitus Shell, No More Afro Wigs, 2008
Vitus Shell (University of Mississippi at Oxford) conflates past and present in paintings that take pages from history as their ground. Shell collages images from newspaper advertisements that belie attitudes about race from the recent past, over which he paints portraits of contemporary African-Americans on whom the influence of those assumptions are seen.
Other artists in the exhibition include Laura Adams (Carnegie Mellon University), Natasha Bowdoin (Tyler School of Art, Temple University), Dara Louise Engler (Indiana University), Asuka Goto (Tyler School of Art, Temple University), Peter Gregorio (School of Visual Arts), Mayumi Komuro (Queens College, City University of New York), John McAllister (Art Center College of Design), Lydia Musco (Boston University), Andrew Patterson-Tutschka (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), Sara Pedigo (University of Massachusetts at Amherst), Ryan Pierce (California College of the Arts), and Rosemary Taylor (Brooklyn College, City University of New York).
More images from the show can be seen here.
