Senior shows explore group dynamics

"I am an individual part of a group," Rachel Gutwein '04 declares in a statement introducing her exhibit of paintings. Her assertion of individuality, one that every Princeton student can sympathize with, could characterize both her and Lauren Holuba '04's senior thesis projects, up until May 2 in the Lucas Gallery at 185 Nassau Street. Both artists seek to distinguish themselves by the company they share; both succeed through vastly different methods.

Holuba's photography exhibition, "Family Is Where We Come From," fills a long, starkly white hallway, but the images themselves tell the story of the intimacy a family shares. Colorful domestic interiors are dispersed among smaller black and white pictures of a family performing everyday, usually overlooked tasks, such as looking out a window or taking out a splinter. Despite the familiarity of the images, much is left unstated. Holuba said she created this mystery as a way to force the viewer to impart his own experience onto an unknown family and better understand his own family by doing so.

"I was not interested in explaining the background," Holuba said. "I wanted to make the images as relatable as possible, even though they are about my own home."

The works are entirely relatable — they allow the viewer to find the profound in the seemingly mundane. Three pictures in sequence show a brother, a mother and a teenage sister at rest, but rather than suggest the dullness of inactivity, the images portray the comfort one finds in his or her own home. The sister stretches out on the floor and the brother squeezes himself between the pillows of a couch in an image that is at once comic and comfortable.

Holuba describes her works as exploring the "intimacy and trust between subject and photographer. Each subject lacks self-consciousness and openly presents his physical vulnerabilities." The subjects seem so content with the photographer's presence that she becomes as much a part of their home as the cluttered closets and the Lego castles.

Gutwein's paintings explore a different kind of intimacy, that of an individual's relationship to her larger community.

Gutwein said through her artwork, she wants to "focus on positive aspects of [my Lakota Sioux heritage], who we are and what we do in celebration and honor of my culture in a gallery indicative of 'American' art. My culture is very different than the 'American' culture on the whole, yet I am a part of both. Issues of assimilation are always present."

Her works explore these issues by depicting the White House next to a series of old photographs of an Indian boy or a young Native American mother in jeans sitting on a patterned, woven blanket. One self-portrait shows Gutwein with an exaggeratedly blue face that contrasts with her red tank top. Another shows her with one braid in front of her shoulder and the other behind, a suggestion that she vacillates between two cultures and she can neither completely reject nor accept either.

The most eye-catching piece is the life-size teepee in the center of the room. A composite of sticks and rope, it surrounds an animal skull that is itself encapsulated in a circle of feathers. The teepee, the most direct appeal to a native culture with which the viewer is familiar, is draped with canvases, the most prominent of which depicts an androgynous blue face. It evokes the face of a wide culture and its distinctive, autonomous members.

Both Holuba and Gutwein probe the disparate identities of the individual and the group member. In doing so, they raise more questions than answers, but as Gutwein puts it, a "far more interesting thing than the answer is the reason for the question in the first place."