Daily: Monday 04/02/2012 - Friday 04/13/2012; 8:30 AM - 7:00 PM
University Park Campus
Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery
Watt Hall, Ground Floor
The graduating Roski School of Fine Arts class of 2012 is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, indigenous to somewhere. This group exhibition in the Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery explores the culminating ideas of nine seniors in their final months of undergraduate art school. Representing the end of one stage and the move into another, the title "indigenous to somewhere" suggests the elasticity of art—in form, origin, and creation—throughout time and space. Participating in the exhibition are Zachary Aronson, Kelsey Bullock, Elvira Clemente, Elizabeth Chabot, June Choi, Gabrielle Exner, Deborah Ho, Victoria Le, and Michael Salvatore.
These works are characterized by their quest for self-understanding and identification, be it through a close-up examination of traditional portraiture or through the alteration of environment. On a more direct level of representation, Vicky Le explores the creation of individual identity through her paintings and photographs that associate with social, economic, and fashion subcultures. The painting included in this show highlights the style, behavior, and interaction between a crowd commonly seen at contemporary fine art openings. Elizabeth Chabot produces large oil paintings of empowered women confronting the conservative stereotype of a female’s place within society by instilling feminist attitudes through gesture and body language. June Choi’s work incorporates personal experiences that she had in her childhood that she wishes to bring back to the present to commemorate it through stylized and dimensionless aesthetics; her work responds to a time when she was an outcast—a black sheep in school. Zachary Aronson creates large-scale drawings on wood planks that present a contemporary perspective on portraiture, reinterpreting classical subject matter, materials, and techniques for a post-photographic digital age.
The show explores identity through a transfiguration of symbolism that redefines norms of signification through means of stylization or found objects. Elvira Clemente’s drawings question the symbolism and ideas of virtue and how they are used to control women’s image. Kelsey Bullock has included two 18”x24” figurative surrealist oil paintings on wood panels that explore the juxtaposition between the living human body and the artificiality of dolls and other humanoid forms. Michael Kiyoshi Salvatore fabricates totemic clay forms that explore the core mechanics of human behavior by deconstructing and transcending popular, restrictive and arbitrary modes of social identification, revealing our universal singularity. Deborah Ho creates recycled accumulations of paintings, drawings, and sculpture that explore the relations between subconscious and mundane human expression. In her installation, she also examines the anarchic economies of giving and sacrifice within identity that are necessary with the inundation of mass culture. Gabrielle Exner engages with outsider art aesthetics combined with an accumulation and gathering strategy to create large installations that allow the experience of a new environment.
As the final academic project for the graduating group, the students of FA 450: Fine Arts Senior Seminar have re-examined the origins and changes of their artistic practices during their past years in the Roski school to present a contemplation of the future to come. Please join them in celebration of the end of one era and the beginning of an exciting unknown at their opening reception, held in the Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery in Watt Hall on Thursday, April 5, 5-7 pm.
The student contributors to this group exhibition are soon-to-be graduates of the USC Roski School of Fine Arts undergraduate program enrolled in FA 450: Senior Seminar.
