Young Artists, Between Phases

As the academic year leans into its finale in our local institutions of higher learning, we’re offered public glimpses of what’s been brewing in the various hallowed halls. In the woodsy Montecito idyll of Westmont College, the caliber and intrigue factors of its art student body has been nudging upward several years, apace with an advancing art department and the impressive Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art. 

Student artists can be counted on to bring fresh ideas, even when sometimes in formative stages, to their own private stylistic niches. So, it is no surprise that this year’s senior art show, In Between Moments, lives up to its name — falling between the lines of literal moments, phase of life, and artistic development, modes, and mediums. What we get is six young artists moving in six different, self-determined directions and media as they go forth.

Some artists incorporate spiritual and biblical references, pursuant to Westmont’s Christian foundation. Some leave spirituality in the realm of the ambiguous and open-to-interpretation.

Biblical/liturgical matters are on the sleeve in the entryway space of the museum. Danielle Anderson’s “Everyday Cathedrals” is a series of charcoal and pen pieces, rendered with a fine, detailed hand. Scenes of “sacred” spaces range from churches and an art gallery, with mystical light beams inhabiting an interior in “Gathered Together,” and a mash-up of history and geography in “Indio, California/Milan, Italy.”

Across the room, in sharp contrast, Logan Miller’s “Facing Experiences” is a group of rough-hewn and rugged relief sculptures hovering over the inspiration of a specific Bible verse, Romans 8:6: “The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the spirit is life and peace.” Mind/body/soul attributes are alluded to, as defined by the titles “Of the Heart,” “Of the Soul,” and “Of the Hollow” — the latter, a large life-size construct based on an enigmatic, hollowed figure, possibly half-angel. “Hollow” also assumes the form of a large, ornately framed, body-length mirror, suggesting a reflection of our own sense of being and body-mind reality.

In the museum’s main gallery, a pair of artists have engaged in inventive (or re-inventive) media concepts, extending beyond simple or singular art/sensory contexts. Jordan Cuskey’s “An Homage to Them” channels personal and domestic memory with its conglomerate installation-based portrait of a homey bedroom. Realism only goes so far: the quilt and pillow have been painted with flowery designs in acrylic, and the walls sport nearly 200 small paintings of family/friend/travel snapshots.

She processes nostalgic recollection by recontextualizing domestic space, but in a warm, openly sentimental way, with only delicate sprinklings of irony.

Hailey Otto, too, is up to some medium-manipulation tricks, but to life-affirmative ends. In her series Sonder, Otto deftly blends stationary art — painted and sculpted — and time-based, kinetic sources of superimposed video and audio, blurring the lines of reality, but tenderly. In “Linger,” an oil painting of a tranquil al fresco scene with tables and chairs under a shading tree, springs manically to life with the superimposition of a precisely placed, fast-motion video of humanity in motion. They become a fleeting, faceless blur, akin to the piled-on sound source of apartment dwellers in “Glimpse.”

Back in an alcove of the museum, “Dwelling” combines a dollhouse-like foamboard framework of a generic house structure with the artist’s video footage of a street corner cellist. The lulling balladic melody he plays turns into a meditative soundscape for museum visitors.

Painting, in the old school sense, also has its slice of the exhibition pie here, albeit with personal twists. For Clare Carey, her Pinpointing Presence series of paintings captures ephemeral moments from the proverbial “transcendence among the commonplace” perspective. Carey brings a photographer’s eye to the considered painting process, from the nearly abstracted streaks of green and blue in “Forest’s Passing By,” to the mottled shadow play of “Stopped by a Shadow.” Shadow dancing is inspiration enough, for the attentive eye and slowed, observant mind.

The most definitively abstract art among the six artists arrives in the form of Blair Hopper’s “1,525 Miles” grouping of colorful, quasi-decorative canvases with shifting arrays of colors and articulations of shapes and textures with bead-like or embroidered surfaces. We are led to read the imagery in a particular way, informed as we are that relationship dynamics are the underlying subject in pieces with such leading titles as “Love,” “Vulnerability,” “Happiness” (the sunlit yellow piece) and “Separation Anxiety 1 and 2.” The latter pieces are less centered around an object, like the others, than they are restless tendrils seeking order.

This year’s crop of senior artists at Westmont are, for all their differences, seekers in the early stage of the life-art-making game.

Between Moments: Westmont College Graduate Exhibition 2024 is on view through May 4 at the Westmont Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art. See westmont.edu/between-moments for additional information.

ALSO: UCSB will unveil its always-enticing MFA exhibition next month. Santa Barbara City College opens its gallery portals to its annual student art cavalcade, April 17 to May 10.