Viviane Eng, Associate Arts Editor
Four senior studio art majors exhibited their capstone projects at the last thesis reception at the Zilkha Gallery on Wednesday. Working in mediums of drawing, woodcut reduction, sculpture, and multimedia photography, the artists brought out distinct conceptual ideas through their individual talents.
Sonya Torres’ “my Reduction” plays with abstraction and color through woodcut reduction. The colors blend like dripping watercolors, but since it’s printed rather than painted, the pieces manage to maintain a much cleaner look than any painting.
“Woodcut reduction printing is interesting because what you have is what you print,” said Torres. “You can never go back.”
Lily Homer’s “openworks” features a combination of wall-mounted sculptures and found objects. The larger sculpture of the two appears loom-like, while the suspended one takes on a paradoxically soft and wiry texture.
Lucia Salwen’s “PLAY” aims to embrace to the fullest extent its name — it’s fun and whimsical. The series of woodblock prints on collaged paper recreates scenes of her parents playing paddleball on the beach. The two figures span the gallery’s two walls where her pieces hang, resembling silhouetted cutouts, holding paddles in a variety of positions.
“I just thought it’d be a fun feeling and scene to convey,” said Salwen, when asked about where she drew inspiration for the project.
“Pedestrian,” a series of drawings by Kaitlin Chan, transports viewers to the city of Hong Kong, especially the island’s Wan Chai neighborhood.
“The drawings are about the experience of moving through a city, especially one in an East Asian context,” Chan explained.
By incorporating a tremendous amount of detail while maintaining a sketch-like quality, Chan tackles both the graphic and the dimensional in her work, alternating between intimate and public images of Hong Kong.
Finally, Alison Lam’s “Static Flow” is an interactive photography installation project, presented in a manner reminiscent of Pipilotti Rist’s 2016 show at The New Museum. Toying with light, image, and repetition, Lam places varyingly cropped photos behind one another, cohering in a new image that demands a different type of engagement than the individual pictures would. For each of these “collaged” images, the viewer must piece photographs of urban environments together with spatial details coming from various images.
These four final projects will be on view at Zilkha Gallery until Sunday, April 30. This year, 19 senior studio art majors completed thesis projects, which were celebrated and exhibited at receptions the last three Wednesdays. After this week’s exhibitions go down, each artist will pick a piece of their work and all of them will be exhibited at once in the gallery.