Student work at 185 Nassau shows crop of artistic talent

Amid torrential rain, the 2004 exhibition of junior independent work in The Program in Visual Arts opened at 185 Nassau Street. Despite the wet conditions, the show was a tremendous success. A plethora of colorful art hung in the Lucas Gallery, contrasting with the stark white walls inside and the black sky outside. The collection is comprised of the work of last year's juniors, now seniors. It serves as a jumping-off point for the direction in which the students want to take their senior theses. Only between eight and 10 students generally exhibit in this show, so their pieces can take up entire walls in the gallery. Walking down the narrow rectangular room, one can see the many styles of Princeton students. The media choices alone are diverse; they include oil, water color and acrylic paint, photography, collage and video. A set of pieces on the walls of the adjoining gallery is practically Pop; Bridget Bardot-esque women slouch in semi-suggestive poses, looking bemused. A cropped and angled piece depicts two women in a vaguely Sapphic position. Amidst another set, a rather creepy man, quite like a haggard Bob Dylan, looms behind a beaming boy in a redand white-striped sweatshirt. No picture has a tag attached, so the more subtle personal elements of the pictures remain undisclosed.

These two sets stick out in a collection of work that mostly borders on nonrepresentational, including some work that is completely abstract. A black outline of a figure pasted high up on the wall looks like it is falling; paint and charcoal whip around it like air pressure or gusts of wind.

Clara Wong '05 holds the monopoly on abstract art; her dozen pieces take up one of the long walls in the main gallery. They range in media: water color, oil and acrylic. Her pieces employ dashes of intense color zigzagging across the page. Her favorite piece, a four-panel scene of lines and swoops practically screams Kandinsky. She described her work as somewhere "between representational and abstract," saying that she became "more abstract over time." For Wong, art has a particular purpose in her life. She said she "came from Hong Kong [and] traveling to a new country was hard . . . [Her] art is like leaving [a] mark here." Another exhibitor, Caroline James '05, sketched en plein air and converted her realistic pictures into a set of "geometric" and angular planes. She described herself as being interested in "how light affects a space, changing it."

Her most notable picture, a truck in a parking lot, is dominated by the diagonal of the truck's body cutting across the picture plane. Caroline said the composition centered on the diagonal proves "what a single object does to a space can influence it immensely and change it completely." This easy genius is evident in all her pieces in which she took a mundane scene and transformed it into a smart and simple abstraction.

This particularly interesting set is countered by a piece of installation art, more dense and complex. In a pile of black tires and sheets, a video screen is placed in the window of a car door. The video continuously plays fragmented clips of a collegiate girl honking the horn of the car, shutting the door and walking into a house, at which point she slams doors repeatedly. Walking through the gallery, a mother and daughter stopped to look at this piece. The daughter tugged her mother's arm and asked, "Didn't we just see this on the street, mom?". Her mother replied, "Well, no, but that's where it belongs." The artist was unavailable for comment.

Despite this and several other pieces of questionable intent and talent, the show is lovely. The colors enhance the moods of all those who walk around, and the charming scenes and obvious energy that went into the paintings are infectious. Several casual visitors left considering taking an art class. The show will be up until Oct. 15.