It’s one of the best times of the year for campus art lovers. Every Monday through March and April the Snelgrove Gallery unveils a new mix of graduating BFA shows.

In the spirit of connections — intentional or unexpected — the Sheaf sat down with seven of the graduating artists. They talked about each other’s work, their own and what it’s like to put together your first show.

It’s a Matryoshka doll of an experience: individual pieces within individual shows within the series as a whole.

The exhibits so far have explored cultural memory, self-portraiture, the play between fantasy and reality, and formal experimentation.

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Yasuo Itoh — [kituna]: Bond, Tie

Aminah Jomha — Catastrophic Uncertainty

Feb. 27 — March 2

Together, Yasuo Itoh and Aminah Jomha had me thinking about cultural memory, identity and place. While Itoh developed a motif, kituna, in the tie of a kimono or as a bridge across the river, Jomha showed a mixed media series based on photographs of Lebanon.[/box] [box type=”note” border=”full” style=”rounded” icon=”none”]

Moraya Coleman — You Mean This Isn’t Neverland?

Dylan Phuong — Intimate Truths and Elaborate Fictions

Clare Bamford — Here and Yet to Come

March 5 – 9

You Mean This Isn’t Neverland? was a show in two parts: silkscreen mythical archetypes on one wall, and across the room, photographs where Coleman cast herself as characters out of fantasy, fairy tales and her favourite fictions like Harry Potter and Ender’s Game.

In dramatic costume and with a wistful expression in her eye, Coleman’s presence in the photographs clashed with the mundane environment of a backyard or food court. I think I’d rather live in Coleman’s world.

Dylan Phuong showed Intimate Truths and Elaborate Fictions. The printmaker’s process became a metaphor for how a person builds up a sense of self. Photographs, physically deconstructed into a series of hanging glass plates, reversed the process.

These three shows focused on the self-portrait. Though the image captures the self in a single moment, these series were often steeped in nostalgia, nods to childhood or a sense of anxiety about the future. Sounds like fitting art to cap off the end of a degree.

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Brianna Whitmore — You, Me, This & That

Emma Anderson — Flow Channel

Candice Grosenick — Ruse

March 19 – 23

“Because really, what separates breakfast from lunch? Is it the orange juice?”

Emma Anderson’s Flow Channel concentrates on in-between spaces. Drawings, a video projection, a paper installation and improvised musical performances are connected by what she describes as “an immersive focused state.”

The video projection is a highlight. It came out of a surprise encounter with two dancers practicing the Argentine tango. Anderson filmed them, then separated their bodies to make the two animations project on opposite walls.

The separation is never quite complete — at any given moment one figure moves into the other’s silhouette.

“It’s how I see relationships ideally,” she explained, “We’re constantly influencing or being influenced by other people. There’s always this dynamic element.”

Is it an intentional pun that Anderson flows into Brianna Whitmore’s show as the subject of one of her prints?

Me, You, This & That pays attention to the small moments in life. Whitmore’s paintings and prints are based on photographs. Her subjects are anecdotal and quiet as well as intricate and careful.

Five oil paintings ground the show. “Painting is the medium I still felt I was learning the most from,” she explained.

Her figures become integrated with their physical environment. It is not necessarily a smooth amorphous blend. The effect can be a bit jagged. In “Hand Washing”, the eye works to follow the lines of the fingers through floral-printed fabric. In another painting, the contents of a fridge cut through the body of a woman who has opened its door.

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Josh Forrest — Progress Works

Alana Moore — Disintegration

Maia Stark — Split

March 26 – 30

Josh Forrest takes full advantage of the freedom to define the gallery space. Progress Works will feature class work, extended media projects and personal hobbies.

“It’s less an overriding theme and just a bunch of pieces that I’m passionate about.”

Forrest looks like Michael Douglas. Look for a short film in which he plays a young variant of Gordon Gekko from Wall Street. There will be a wood/metal ladder sculpture, a seven-foot collage and spoken word poetry.

“My overriding theme is how beauty can inevitably decay,” he explained. “You can expect it, but you can also accelerate its destruction or decay. So the result is choices, in all areas of life — personal, political, environmental.”

In Dis-Integration, Alana Moore is interested in the ways that people can connect in a fast-paced, plugged-in world.

“I kept going to the Farmer’s Market every week and wishing it was my entire life,” she said.

Moore does large-scale oil paintings. Her figures dominate the space as they interact with different devices. In one, a woman is on her iPhone: “She’s kind of consumed by this thing that she’s plugged in to.”

Using cubist techniques, and inspired by phenomenology, Moore is interested in how experience is literally fragmented. These influences come out in the way she paints the body. There is a constant tension between fragmentation and representation.

Maia Stark’s Split is about the body too. It’s a show full of doubles.

Stark remembered putting up a painting last year of herself and her identical twin. “People were asking, ‘Why are you duplicating yourself? What’s that about?’ It sparked this series of work about the duplication of bodies.”

Split includes painted self-portraits and watercolours. The first set of paintings is more mysterious and removed. In watercolour, bodies become tumorous, billowing out and falling apart, as pretty colours combat the deformity of the shapes.

“There’s this tension between line and wash, pretty and ugly. The watercolours are more about how people feel about their own bodies a lot of the time.”

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Rodney Muzyka — Defining Lines

Pamela Ollenberger — Visual Rhetoric

April 2 – 6

Rodney Muzyka does mark making on paper, expressing his ideas most comfortably in the range from black to white.

“I like to use paper as a medium and as a tool. The paper shows through — it creates positive and negative space.”

“What I like about Rodney’s work,” said Anderson, “is that he takes these really complex things — like a trunk of a tree that’s so textured — and specifically chooses lines to define that object, that tree, that space, that place.”[/box]

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Photos: Raisa Pezderic/The Sheaf