IRWIN
SCHOLAR 2002 ARTIST INFORMATION:
Painting:
Meghan Bahn investigates material as metaphor through mixed media painting combining
traditional art media with items from everyday life. Brandon Bird paints mainly
in oils and will be doing a life-size painting of John Tesh for the exhibition.
He notes, "my ideas may be ironic, but theyre also completely sincere."
Katrina Knuten is attracted to the qualities and possibilities of surface and
employs almost anything including beeswax, sand, found objects, paper, and cheesecloth
in a playful process exploring line and texture. Josh Lukes aesthetic
is influenced by classical techniques of realism and composition. His oil paintings
deal with issues of animal cruelty and consumption. Maria Pugnetti suggests
that her abstract paintings are a composite of ghostly plots on maps to locations
in her subconscious.
Photography:
Lea Anna Drown uses photography as a tool to discuss presentations of the human
body, exploring the subjects relationship to constructed and pre-existing
environments. Emily Lessard uses photography in unorthodox ways that include
scratching the print, making camera-less images, and sewing on prints. Courtney
Nimura deals with personal documentation in her large-scale color photograhic
images. Nimura surmises, "Through this medium, I allow myself to have both
an insider and outsiders view of all these fleeting seconds, these passages
through time."
Printmaking:
Janina Larenas is a printmaker who compiles her work in book format. Tom Robinson
makes photo-lithographs of urban areas in southern England. He says, "This
work deals with a link between memory and place. Specifically, it is an attempt
to transpose memories of place onto the viewer in such a way that the print
becomes familiar despite never having been seen before."
Sculpture:
Evan Holm creates large-scale sculpture projects in glass, metal, and wood.
For the Irwin show, he will create an outdoor environment made entirely of glass
that mirrors the coy fish pond in the Porter College Courtyard. He notes, "This
piece speaks to my fascination with the fundamental structures and patterns
beneath the surface. By distilling the structure of this small ecosystem laid
bare and devoid of movement and life, questions are raised about life and death,
and the framework governing the movements from one toward the other."
Installation, Intermedia and Performance:
Peter Chester works in installation and acoustic sculpture and currently has
a piece exhibited at the Felix Kulpa Gallery here in Santa Cruz. Rebecca Frediani
uses performance, video, and installation addressing political notions of public
vs. private. Kaytea Petros work includes everything from formal figure
sculpture and installation to guerilla performance art, deploying political,
environmental, and community-building activist discourses. Frediani and Petro
have collaborated on several performance pieces and interactive installations.
Their piece for the Irwin exhibition makes connections between industrial militarization
and private citizens. They suggest, "We are deploying interventionalist
tactics that compel the viewer to become complicit in the piece, and hopefully
through their interaction, recognize their own potential for martial complacency.
Benign objectstoysare used to lure participants into the realm of
play, metaphorically sucking them into the violent discourse that permeates
"post-September 11 American Society." April Frykenberg works with
the interactive qualities of performance to create memory. Her piece for the
Irwin exhibition will be the third in an ongoing series of performance and installation
work dealing with monsters. Gabriel Gilder creates interdimentional
art exploring patterns and distortions.
For more information, please contact Leslie Fellows, Gallery Manager at the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery at 831/459-5667 or email: lfellows@cats.ucsc.edu. Please visit our website at http://arts.ucsc.edu/sesnon.