The 2008 Student Art Exhibition, running at the David Winton Bell Gallery until March 30, states its purpose up front. This declaration of intent comes in the form of Alice Malone's '08 pair of multimedia works, "Explosion I" and "Explosion II," which the viewer encounters immediately upon entering the building.
Both works depict the same image - a volcanic eruption, perhaps, or a detonating bomb - but here their similarities end. One is so small it might be overlooked by someone scanning the gallery. The other unmistakably dominates the room. One is framed by a jaunty fabric border covered in feathery fringes. The other is unframed and starkly present. Most crucially, one depicts the explosion in impressionistic brushstrokes, as if seen through the haze of its own smoke, while the other uses reams of colored satin to construct a concrete and physically immediate experience.
Hung beside each other, these two exceptional works - which garnered Malone one of the four Minnie Helen Hicks Prizes in Art to Women Students - create a dialogue of juxtaposition and inversion. Within the gallery space, the pieces have been grouped according to an astute interpretation of their common thematic or formal elements. The Student Exhibition invites viewers to appreciate and savor the juxtapositions, the ways in which artists have tackled a variety of common challenges or subjects in different and intriguing ways.
For example, works by Jesse Cohn '10 and Thomas Dahlberg '09 both use grids as a formal component, but the artists' interpretations could not be more different. In his painting, "Ad Nauseum," Dahlberg takes an approach reminiscent of 1960s experiments in optical art: He painstakingly replicated a particular geometric pattern hundreds of times, creating rows of nearly identical cells. Consequently, minute variations in the pattern leap out as bold statements. The painting's oppressive monotony, together with its dark, earthy color palette, seems to turn pure image into material weight, something that is actually heavy on the eyes.
Cohn's prize-winning installation, conversely, is all about lightness. Using microfilament, she has taken the grid and extended it through space. The wires' thinness makes them almost invisible from a distance. Approaching the work and viewing it from different angles is an exciting, dizzying experience. Dahlberg's neighboring painting gains additional substance in the context of Cohn's piece, which itself seems even more weightless when next to "Ad Nauseum."
According to jurors Murray McMillan and Anne Tait - both artists and professors at Roger Williams University - these types of correspondences among the works emerged naturally in the jury process. Tait speculated that, because most of the pieces submitted for the show came out of assignments for classes in the Department of Visual Arts, certain correlations were bound to appear as individual students interpreted the same assignment in different ways.
With input from Bell Gallery Curator Jo-Ann Conklin, Tait and McMillan spent hours winnowing the 150 submissions down to the approximately 40 works that appear in the show. In addition, the jury awarded the Hicks Prize to Cohn, Malone, Megan Billman '09 and Mary MacGill '10. The Gilbert Stuart Prizes in Art went to David Lloyd '08, John Szymanski '09 and Alex Rosenbaum '08. Because the Hicks Prize can only be awarded to women, juries traditionally choose to present the Stuart Prizes only to male students.
Inevitably, when jurors assemble such a selective show, many artists find themselves left out. Consequently, almost as long as there have been juried shows, rejected artists have banded together to present their work for exhibition.
Student artists at Brown have been organizing their own impromptu "Reject Shows" throughout the 28-year history of the juried exhibition. Last year, the Reject Show was held as a formal event in gallery space at Brown/RISD Hillel, and this year, for the first time, the Reject Show is taking place in the lobby and second-floor gallery of List Art Building, concurrent with the Student Exhibition.
All of the artists who had no works selected by the jury were given the opportunity to exhibit in the Reject Show. The resulting collection of some 20 rejected works, placed directly adjacent to the Bell Gallery space, could be considered the most obvious juxtaposition of all.
"The whole point of the Reject Show is to say, this is what they didn't choose, take a look, see what you think," said Alice Nystrom '08, who coordinated the show. "I think (the jurors) did a great job, which makes the Reject Show that much more interesting."
This year's Reject Show is an interesting mix of pieces that would not be at all out of place in the juried exhibition and pieces that certainly would. With its powerful sense of drama, Geddes Levenson's '09 charcoal-and-chalk drawing, "Cleopatra's Last Kiss," is the most impressive example of the former, but paintings by Hope Hardesty '08 and Kate Goldberg '08 are also particularly strong.
"I think it's a fabulous idea," said McMillan, of the Reject Show. "I'm such a fan of it because it really underlines the question about judgment in curation in the first place." The Reject Show invites viewers to challenge the judgments made by juries, which are almost always, as Tait put it, "opaque and anonymous."
It also encourages the artists themselves not to put too much stock in the decisions that juries make about their work. "Being a participant in a juried show is learning that you don't always know why some people choose your work, that you can't base your ego on being included or excluded in a show," Tait said.
"Art's not about external validation," she said. "You have to decide for yourself why you want to make it."
