"Dexterity"

12-11-15
On December 3^rd I attended the opening reception of the Annual Student Art Exhibition “Dexterity” that was put on by the University’s art club, the Art Maniacs, and was curated by San Francisco curator Kevin B. Chen.  The show took place in the Jot Travis Building on campus in the Student Galleries South.  All of the art that is shown in this exhibition are student artworks and were initially submitted for the guest curator Mr. Chen to choose from.  Being an art student myself I did submit a piece of my own artwork but unfortunately it was not chosen for the show; however there were other students from my art classes whose artwork did get chosen, and one of them even won a prize, who I would like to say congratulations to.  A total of three people won a prize from the judge, Kevin B. Chen was a judge for the artwork as well as a guest curator for the entire show, and a fourth person won an award at the end of the night for being the public’s favorite piece.  There are three spaces to this gallery space and in each space there is a different sort of theme going on.  The first was that of the person and body, showing mostly portrait paintings and a small handful of reenactment videos of previous video artists from the 1900s.  There was one piece of sculpture that was placed almost in the middle of the room. It was rather odd to look at and process because it was simply a broken chair that had a wax foot attached to one of the legs of the chair.  It is titled “There’s No Forgetting”, but I’m not really sure what ewe are supposed to be remembering in order to not forget it.  In the second gallery space was some of the more abstract pieces that were submitted to the show.   This included from abstract sculpture to the raw material of Jasmine Halow’s “Illusions of Nature”.  One piece in this room really stood out to me and that was Corina Shoemaker’s “Psyche”, a collection of wax butterflies arranged to fit what seemed to be gears that were flat and rectangular in shape, which then allowed for them to be hung on the wall, wire was also used in a way which seemed to add detail to the butterflies and an overall effect of the piece.    On the opposite wall of these pieces of art were the twenty video diptychs from the students of the class Art 345- Sound and Image.  Two TVs were set up with a chair in front of them so that the viewer could watch through them comfortably.   In the third gallery space of this exhibition was simply a big cardboard dinosaur that was created by the class Art 350- Advanced Digital Media.  When I first heard that there was a dinosaur in the third room I wasn’t really sure what to expect because it had not been mentioned that it was made out of cardboard, I was thinking of some tall T-Rex made out of plaster or something, not to say that I was disappointed or anything because the dinosaur did look great, it’s just not the first image that popped into my head when someone said dinosaur.  The artwork pieces that were chosen for this show were really great and I think it shows just how talented the students of this University are.  I am a little sad that my submitted piece was not chosen but after learning the flow of the show that had been chosen I understood why my piece, and the others that I had seen that were also not chosen, did not make it into the actual art exhibition.  I really liked the show overall and many of the pieces that were chosen and I would like to congratulate the four artists who won an award throughout the night.