In Depth: an Exhibition of Works in Relief
Art by (L-R) Clara Tang, Ty Suksangasophon, Cynthia Hamika, Chase Glogower, Daisy Sanchez, Martha Hall, and Iulia Filipov-Serediuc. Photo courtesy Martha Hall.
In Depth: an Exhibition of Works in Relief
Iulia Filipov-Serediuc, Chase Glogower, Martha Hall, Cynthia Hamika, Daisy Sanchez, Ty Suksangasophon, Clara Tang, curated by Martha Hall.
On view at UNLV Student Union Gallery, UNLV Student Union Building through August 2021.
By D.K. Sole
There’s a good BFA student show in UNLV’s Donna Beam gallery as I write this (slumping teddybear concrete; a cake painting that calls back to the trembling dayglo zig-zags of 1980s graphic design), but it’s closing soon (a short run) so I’m going to write about the exhibition in the Student Union instead. It doesn’t come down until August, so you’ve still got time to go. The SU gallery is student-oriented and the work they show there often suffers from a mismatch between the ambitions of the artists (timidly inexhaustible) and their technical ability and judgement (still figuring things out), but In Depth is largely an exception.
The curator, Martha Hall, is a ceramicist, a mode of looking at the world that manifests itself here in her attention to plastic surfaces: what they’re made of, what they look like, and what they represent. In Depth focuses your attention on the places where those three things don’t mesh. Hall’s own piece, Domestic Vignette, is hyperrealistic here and there - the towel in the basket is made from a towel - but then you get to the steam coming out of the kettle and it’s a length of wire bent into a cartoon puff, hanging gawkishly out of the surface plane. Thrown out of the illusion, you notice that the wooden backing surface looms unnecessarily large behind the shallow relief. Shouldn’t it be staying out of the way, like a good support system? By drawing your attention to its aimless prowess, Domestic Vignette asserts the right of the artist to pull you around wherever she likes, even if she has to ignore the outcry from her own illustration of a tiled floor and kitchen cupboards. Is Vignette doing what it pretends to do when it shows you the details of this kitchen, or would it prefer to suck your gaze into the bland void of the wood?*
As a curator, Hall uses the grid of the tiles to carry you over to the otherwise-unalike piece to the left of it, a sheet of aluminum patterned with bumpy squares by Daisy Sanchez (antisport); and to the fat cross plus disembodied fingers on its right, constructed by Iulia Filipov-Serediuc (A Binding Oath: the Punk-y Promise). Nearby she pairs two works that present you with very different ideas about the possibilities of textiles - Clara Tang creating abstract sails out of sheer nylon and wire while Ty Suksangasophon mushes secondhand children’s clothing onto a canvas and drenches it with paint. His painting is an illustration of wine and plated food, like an advertisement for an aspirational French restaurant. The title is there to tell you how expensive it is: Burger of Kobe Beef, Foie Gras, Black Truffles, with Bottle of Petrus. It’s easy to read this as an acid heartwringer about wealth and poverty (rich truffle-eater playing piggy over poor kids and their threadbare shirts), but in the company of Domestic Vignette, and, even more so, the piece two steps to its right, you’re invited to feel justified if you pay more attention to the joke of the buttons swirling around in what you thought at first was a sincere meat patty.
That piece to the right (skipping past Cynthia Hamika’s Arguing with Croissants) is Chase Glogower’s 100% Wood-Free, the best piece of comedy in the show. The illusion is off, even before you read the list of materials. This is not trying to be wood, you think: it is trying to be pretend wood. You can draw a distinction between Wood-Free and the work of other, more realistic, this-into-that artists (Kaz Oshiro for example, that painter-sculptor whose shaped canvases refuse to let you stop believing in the I-beam or the dumpster that your eyes – but not your mind – are looking at). Glogower doesn’t make his artificial materials look perfectly like wood. But he’s convincing enough to put you into a state of hesitation between the possibilities. All right, so it’s not that, but then what is it? What is so large, so domineering, so inescapably there? Exposing and then mocking (or maybe sharing?) your longing for a forceful presence, his dark square becomes an advertisement for something pale and shy: its own label, where you can read the answer to your question. “Foam, plaster, and acrylic paint.”
In Depth is effective and strange when its jokes are semi-obvious.** The stillness of confusion you feel in front of 100% Wood-Free’s dumb insistence on wood is more subtle than the one-glance-and-you-get-it delicacy of Tang’s netting.
*After I finished this article I came across the following explanation by the artist, which it seems only fair to reproduce here. “I was inspired to create the work because of the importance of the place and idea of “home” that has been instilled in me by my family. Traditional methods of home-making have significance to me as do the materials in the piece. The planks of wood flooring used as the base of the piece are the original flooring my father laid in my childhood home. I tiled over these planks with a scene featuring a place and objects I associate with memory and nostalgia, including aluminum, a clothespin, and fabric.”
** But not completely obvious. Hamika is moving in a similar direction to Glogower, but when she cuts open one of her fake croissants to show you the stuffing inside then the suspense is broken. The violent “arguing” in the title isn’t manifested in the work; the cut is calculated and the stuffing is a friendly puff. See her painted canvas pastries in the Donna Beam instead, if you have time.
Also! I work at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art on the same campus as this exhibition, so take my possible biases into account as you read. On the plus side, the Museum has nothing to do with the Student Union gallery.
In Depth: an Exhibition of Works in Relief
Iulia Filipov-Serediuc, Chase Glogower, Martha Hall, Cynthia Hamika, Daisy Sanchez, Ty Suksangasophon, Clara Tang, curated by Martha Hall.
On view at UNLV Student Union Gallery, UNLV Student Union Building, 4505 S Maryland Pkwy, Las Vegas, NV 89154
April – August 2021
Posted by D.K. Sole on May 26th, 2021