Everything Under the Sun

Metro student art show proves that thereâs strength in diversity

This yearâs Metro art students express a various array of mediums, textures and a reoccurring Christian symbol.

The 1998 Student Art Exhibition,opened March 9 at the Emmanuel Gallery for students and the public to view.

Beginning at the upper level of the gallery were two boxes, silver and black mixed media, made by Yuko Sato.
The silver box features a picture of an old glass medicine bottle with an image of an ape in a tree, titled Capsule.

Opposite from that, the black box, The Passage of Memories, illuminating a rotary image revealing keys, doorways, staircases and other dreamlike images, giving the piece an overall Escher-like animation.

Sharing the same wall as Sato is Tony A. Diegoâs oil on wood piece Sanctuary of An Illiterate. Diego fastened slender wooden planks tightly together with the workâs only real detail being faintly painted numbers and random lines. Sanctuary of An Illiterate clearly defines the limitation of voice and perspective a shell of ignorance dominates.

On the opposite wall hangs Red Cross, a silver gelatin on color prints created by Rick Overby. The silver gothic-style tower and arches that stand in the foreground of Red Cross form a crucifix overlapping a red print of human figures twisting about and expressing both pain and pleasure on their faces in a ritual setting Catholicism back 1,000 years.

Along the same symbolic lines is the Cruxi-Fiction series by Jose Salazar. Salazar presents two silver prints, one of

hands and one of feet, both being nailed to a plank. Salazar fails to capture the inflicting torture of a shard of steel being plunged into flesh, leaving the body extensions themselves appearing much like stone figures with no passion.

The notion of crucifixion is carried over still in Lori Kanaryâs appropriately titled work Crusifixtion. Kanaryâs pen-and-ink piece does, however, take a different direction than that of the previous titles.

She uses brilliant color and a more irregular approach, unveiling characters of no apparent anatomical detail and a fairer emotion.

Kanary particularly hits her stride in Houses, an equally surreal nature, while still utilizing brilliant color. Houses depicts a distorted dreamlike staircase winding through the curvy red landscape.

Kelly Geiser contributed two silver prints to the exhibit. One of them. Solitude, shows an interesting top view of a person sitting humbly on a cold flight of stairs, arms crossed and looking straight ahead at the bottom of another staircase. The figure is entirely surrounded by a sea of urban graphite. Given the angle of the photo, viewers should find it interesting to decide just from what angle the picture was taken.
 

Ismael A. Lozano has created a few of the more colorful and sizely oils, one of which, his Never Forget, is an engaging outlook at the racism and terror inflicted by the KKK.

Never Forget shows a malicious parade of Klan figures, all masked, leading the slaying of the Mexican people. In the foreground, one of the white-headed beings is wielding a sickle tainted in blood like the Aryan reaper with a swastika tattoo and a crucifix, signifying a moral and social paradox.

 Of the more abstract genera is Moth Tooth, a mixed-media diptych done by Shae Woodhouse. Moth Tooth consists of a two-piece multidirectional run of color over a chain of childlike drawings of stars in a line.

Screw Art, a computer graphics piece on wood by Darren Allman, is more cynical. Its premise is quite simple, a random line of wood screws standing on their heads, but the piece does have an absorbing dimension.