Third-year art student Mike Russell can finally access his record player now that his large work of art, “Untitled Bible Study #1″ is in the New Wight Gallery rather than his room.
Other works on the wall of the New Wight Gallery are pictures, paintings and projections of videos, some discussing the role of student artists in the art world, some, like Russell’s, discussing the gray area between faith and lack thereof and still others discussing the role of women in the household.
The UCLA 2011 Undergraduate Juried Exhibition, currently showing in the New Wight Gallery in the Broad Art Center is on display through Feb. 24.
“Visual practice is important to all students,” said Clara Kim, curator at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater and the juror for this year’s Undergraduate Juried Exhibition. “The works in the exhibition are works that speak to our social context.”
Kim whittled down the submissions from the initial 88 artists to the 31 student artists featured in the exhibition. According to Kim, her decisions were ultimately an issue of limited gallery space.
“We’ve had more submissions this year than we’ve had in recent history,” said Ben Evans, an arts department staff research associate who helped oversee the installation of the works. “I think, as a whole, the handful of work that Clara Kim has selected does really reflect what’s been happening within the undergraduate program this year.”
The exhibition features work from students in the UCLA art program, including third-year art student Trenton Szewczyk, whose performance piece, “Circumference,” was delivered at the opening reception.
On Thursday, as each piece of art and its respective artist were introduced to the public, Szewczyk, dressed as an art enthusiast and sporting a mustache, confronted the other artists by asking what price they would put on their work.
Although the performance has passed, Szewczyk summarized its meaning with a Venn diagram taped to the gallery wall, with the words “academic,” “museum” and “commercial” scrawled in blue ink on lined notebook paper.
“Nobody addresses what happens outside this place, what life is like outside this place, so I think it’s important to keep that frame of reference in mind as you’re going through an arts education; like, ultimately what are you going to end up doing?” Szewczyk said.
Russell’s “Untitled Bible Study #1″ is the first piece that many will notice because of its large size and location at the front of the gallery.
For his piece, Russell laid torn-out pages from his mother’s old Bible on top of a canvas and layered on top of them pages from science fiction novels wrapped around a metal wire, which was displayed in an intricate spiral shape over the Bible canvas.
Russell’s inspiration for his piece came when he discovered his mother’s old Bible in a Goodwill box in his parents’ garage. This small act compelled Russell to make a comment on faith.
“I think it was just this fascination with something being abandoned and me wanting to make it into something new, and it just happened to connect to things I’m going through and things I’m dealing with and who I am,” Russell said.
“(It addresses) where I’ve come from and where I’m going and what I believe and just faith in general or lack of faith ““ that space in between.”
Russell said that it was important to him that he could now direct friends and family to the gallery to experience his work in person, rather than through images of the work.
According to Evans, the exhibition offers student artists the opportunity to show their work in a professional setting.
“It gives them some kind of real world experience, and the whole activity of having work submitted to a show and having it selected for a show. They also get to see what an outside opinion is of the work,” Evans said.