With 15 art majors showing work at the Bates College Museum of Art, this spring's Annual Senior Exhibition was the biggest in years. It was big qualitatively too. In sophistication and sheer presence, much of this work was ready for gallery walls in the real world.
In 2003, the student artists came from as near as Belfast and as distant as Austria. The work was similarly disparate, yet unified by a focus and intensity reflecting both the discipline of the art-thesis process and the strengths of the Bates art department: painting, photography, printmaking and ceramics.
According to gallery attendant Connie McGillicuddy, visitors especially liked sculptures made by Mollie Holt of Sun Valley, Idaho. Holt's photographs of doors seemed to float inside a row of Plexiglas cubes. The doors were engaging but the work was more about perception itself — to understand the illusion, one had to bend right down to cube level. Talk about an entrée for William Burroughs' "doors of perception" quote.
Katherine Austin made color photographs of her family at home in Shaker Heights, Ohio — Mom on the Phone, After My Shower, Dad Taking Off His Socks. The message was open to interpretation, but the execution, in saturated pastels, was gorgeous.
Angst is a college staple, and Shana Small, from Surrey, England, made a virtue of generational necessity in her big-eyed black and white oil portraits. Pushing painterly effects — chiaroscuro, gestural brushwork, rough surfaces — Small effectively channeled the German Expressionists.
In pronounced contrast were paintings by Elizabeth Calihan of Wilmette, Ill., and Brent McCoy of Hardwick, Vt. Calihan adapted details from Rubens' Shivering Venus to achieve an intriguing balance between representation and abstraction.
Fully representational, McCoy's self-portraits were technically tight and spiritually light. Each commented wryly about self-image and masculinity — Two Inches, for instance, depicts McCoy with a tape measure registering that dimension, thereby proving that an artist with his talent can do excellent work without overextending himself.
— Doug Hubley
