Senior Art Exhibition to open at Williams College Museum of Art
Williamstown — Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) presents …The Horse You Rode In On, the Williams College senior students' art exhibition that celebrates the culmination of each artist's work. The exhibition, which will be on view from May 9 through June 1, 2008, features the work of 14 Williams College art majors: Evan Barrett, Hannah Buchsbaum, Kim Dacres, Karina Godoy, Sean Hayes, Rory Jensen, Elizabeth Kohout, Ben Kolesar, Eugene Korsunskiy, Brandon Lucien, Elspeth Macmillan, Tony Maruca, Sophie Scully, and Amanda Zaitchik. The show will open with a free, public reception on Friday, May 9 at the museum, beginning at 7:30 pm. All are invited to attend.The Class of 2008 has worked in a variety of media, including oil paint, charcoal, ink, acrylics, cartoon animation, coffee, spray paint, rubber, and aluminum foil. The students’ work vary greatly, but share resonances, such as themes of beauty, grief, the body space, celebrity, conservation, urbanization, self-identity, hiding, and chance.
“It wasn’t until this year when the convenient term-billed lab fees stopped and the handed-out packets of supplies stopped that I began to realize how much time, effort and money is required to physically realize complex ideas,” says graduating senior Eugene Korsunskiy.
The students have employed a variety of methods to create their art, such as monotype, dry point print, manipulating layers of Mylar and tissue paper, and more unusual methods, such as painting on plywood and plexiglass, and sculpting masks from used car tires.
Evan Barrett has worked with acrylic and graphite, exploring through additive and subtractive processes the chaos and order in the creation, evolution, and destruction of cities. Hannah Buchsbaum has used dry point print on mylar and tissue paper in a series of miniature self-portraits that investigate the use of layers and reflection to create distance between the subject and its representation. Kim Dacres has worked with a variety of eclectic recycled media, to create African-inspired masks, making a commentary about the politics of usage, recycling. Karina Godoy’s meticulous, fluid ink drawings explore the sexualized body. Sean Hayes has used video animation to create fantastical narratives about student life, in which fact and fiction are humorously merged.
Rory Jensen has created a series of miniature and meticulously rendered charcoal self-portraits. Elizabeth Kohout has created an unstitched patchwork of blue oil on canvas to explore the process of mourning, grief, and healing. Ben Kolesar’s diagrammatic ink drawings consider the meaning of “camouflage” and the transparency and opacity of our increasingly interconnected lives. Eugene Korsunskiy works in coffee, ink, and acrylic producing crisply rendered swirls of chance that explore the liquid and solid properties of his media. In an Andy Goldsworthy-esque impulse, Tony Maruca has also used the charcoal medium to create large-scaled reproductions of photographed snow sculptures that glow with mystery and epic allure. Elspeth Macmillan and Brandon Lucien have both examined controversial popular culture icons to ask questions about beauty, ugliness, and the darker side of pop-star veneration. Sophie Scully has created a series of portraits on plywood and Plexiglass, whose unusual texture and visual properties conceal the sitters’ contexts, to focus more closely on their corrugated faces and the distinctive ways they occupy space. Amanda Zaitchik has created a series of fragmented self-portraits that are threaded to nails on the wall to address the fragility of self-identity.
The Williams College Museum of Art is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is free and the museum is wheelchair accessible. For more information, please contact: Suzanne Silitch, Director of Public Relations and External Affairs, 413.597.3178; WCMA@williams.edu; <www.wcma.org>.
