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 they’re 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 Luke’s 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 subject’s 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 outsider’s 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 Petro’s 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 objects—toys—are 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.