SOU Art Faculty Exhibition

Exhibition Essay

The Schneider Museum of Art brought the academic year of 2000-2001 to a close with a biennial exhibition of new work by Southern Oregon University Art Department Faculty. Artwork by outstanding SOU art students and a regional juried show of work by southern Oregon high school art students entitled The Best of the Best opened concurrently with the Art Faculty exhibition. These two exhibitions were featured in the Art Building and the Marion Ady Building adjacent to the museum.

Everything presented in the faculty show is new work, and consequently, in the months before the Biennial, one tends to find teachers keeping longer hours in the art labs and studios than the students.

I was given some personal, clandestine previews of several pieces of yet-to-be-unveiled faculty artwork, and without giving too much away, would like to offer some short observations and descriptions.

Digital Art teacher Miles Inada’s forthcoming computer generated prints subvert the super sophistication of high tech media, and instead employ the tools of the information age to explore and further articulate issues of expressiveness in drawing. Miles’ drawings are very musical, possess a nearly brutal simplicity, and appropriate much of the style and technique of cartooning. The final product, refreshingly, is more related to the Graffiti Art Movement than it is to the super-polished images typical of mainstream commercial digital art. The prints rely on the expressiveness of line rather than the power of a central processing unit.

In her paintings, Peg Sjogren, painting and drawing instructor, continues to expand a pervasive, long term theme: the Tenniel illustrations of “Alice in Wonderland” as basis of a complex personal and social feminist allegory. Sjogren’s paintings are thematically driven, and “Alice in Wonderland” has been a central impetus in Sjogren’s work for years.

A series of photographs by visiting artist Pipo Nguyen-duy entitled “Two Million Steps” creates an evocative narrative of the artist’s journeys through the cities and countryside of Vietnam. The poetic imagery of “Two Million Steps” also serves as physical documentation of the artist’s expenses.

New work by SOU sculpture instructor, Marlene Alt, in the Faculty Biennial features towering “dress forms, ” constructed from wood which rely on economy of shape, sureness of form, and physicality of materials to such an extent that the work edges up on minimalist issues. In spite of this, Alt’s work retains a dense connection to personal experience, visual metaphor, and emotionality. In contrast to the wooden dress forms, Alt’s figural assemblage of ornate silver dinner platters seems intricate and delicate and seems to fold in on itself where the wooden dress forms forcefully project themselves into their environment.

The Faculty Biennial is an exhibition of special importance to the local arts community, and offers a diverse range of work, media, and personal exploration. It is always anticipated with equal levels of excitement on the part of both students and faculty, and it’s the perfect finale for the academic year.

-Isaac Peterson, 2001

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