Like a gang of cowboys riding into town, here come “The Seven,” a collection of photography leading the student art galleries at Cal State Long Beach this week.
“The Seven” occupy both the East and West Gatov Galleries as well as the Maxine Merlino Gallery. The exhibit is the senior show and portrays a variety of different applications of their skills.
Beginning with “29 Palms,” a photo documentary by Jasmine Clark about life on a Marine base, photography is explored as a humanizing force. The photos depict soldiers getting haircuts and tattoos that represent a personal behind-the-scenes look at America’s fighting force.
A collection of photos by Patricia Fraser pushes the boundaries of photography by using medical X-rays as the photographic medium, challenging our notions of what can be photographed.
Fraser tries to use this medium to explore frayed family bonds, but how she does this isn’t made abundantly clear. She writes snippets on the X-rays, but without context they don’t make enough sense to a casual viewer.
Another set of photos, by Jacob Greenlund, explores the space a media photographer works in. Instead of a controlled studio, Greenlund points out that the media operate in the chaos of a real world setting.
He goes on to discuss the symbiotic relationship between celebrity, pop culture and society in terms of the roles they play in forming and sustaining each other.
Photographer Maria Elena Malovos turns in an interesting collection featuring underwater photography. She depicts herself submerged under water in a scene reminiscent of “The Graduate” (or “Rushmore” for some).
Malovos manages to capture an unusual environment and some of the potential for interesting movements and meanings in that space.
Rounding out the featured works is Valerie Paignien, who contributed a film to the photo show.
Paignien’s exhibit has a film projected on the wall featuring Paignien putting on different articles of clothing while her voice calmly tells the French name of those clothing articles.
She said the idea is to juxtapose the linguistic gender-label attached to the clothes with social expectations of the clothing themselves.
In the Werby Gallery, Jeremiah C. Gusha presents his metals and wood exhibit. His jewelry is finely wrought and showcases his mastery of many metalworking techniques such as chasing, soldier inlay, etchings, casting and blacksmithing.
Gusha said that a theme in his work is the contrast between what is precious versus what is common and how that relates to natural versus man-made objects.
An example of this is his piece, “Can’t See the Forest,” a necklace ornament with a small cross-section of wood placed within a silver frame of a little house.
The wood is cheap, while the silver is expensive, yet the wood is what holds the whole house together. In this case, there is a dichotomy between substance and form.
In the Dutzi this week is Nancy Voegeli-Curran’s abstract paintings, which fuse chance and intention together through a combination of drip painting and tracing.
Voegeli-Curran captures the randomness of the dripped paint by tracing the patterns and then superimposing layers of those patterns to create greater “reverberations and repercussions.”
Both the original paint drip and the layers on top of it work together to create surprisingly natural forms. Voegeli-Curran describes the effects as cosmic, cellular or even geographical.
In her paintings, the viewer is led to make an analogy between the planned randomness of her paintings and a divine plan behind the seemingly random natural forms they try to represent.
The weekly student art galleries run Monday through Thursday, noon to 5 p.m.
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