UT Art and Architecture Honors Exhibit

When you enter the Ewing Gallery in the Art and Architecture building on the University of Tennessee-Knoxville campus to view this year’s Honor Exhibit, the first thing you notice is the video surveillance camera aimed at your face. It’s mounted on one of the moveable exhibit walls behind a backward Plexiglas sign on which the words “When are You Being Watched” are engraved. This is obviously the work of a student, not a confrontational monitoring system installed by the University. It is, in fact, one of Jody Bennett’s creations, titled “Always.” The monitor is just a few yards to the right, mounted in a transparent box in the middle of the floor. As you wander through the exhibit, you will encounter another wonderfully paranoid Bennett piece, titled “Come Closer.” No matter what distance you are from the fabric-wrapped monitor, an image of yourself presented there is a barely decipherable blur. An adjacent wall holds a series of Bennetts’ night photography. The photos are highly saturated with the colors of artificial night illumination and printed simply on matt paper with black borders.

Video takes centerstage again in a series of four shorts by Samantha Dillehay. The enthusiastically brutal “Infliction,” features a girl staring patiently ahead while anonymous hands enter the screen area to slap her on the face. Though it is clear she isn’t really being hurt, this cruelty makes the difficulties of adolescence seem like a party. “Johnny Played with Barbies when He was Growing Up” is a graphically rich black and white video of two male torsos spastically merging and separating as they move across the screen. One torso is wearing a black bra and panties, the other a white shirt and tie. As the animated stills morph the torsos together, the twitchy, mechanical soundtrack matches their movement. Two more videos, “Guilt, Wash, Pain, Drain” and “Iconoclasm” complete the set.

Julian Rogers has a series of paintings built upon the time-honored tradition of magazine collage. At various times all of us have had to cut various clippings from slick magazines to fulfill some teacher’s assignment, and then agonized over pasting them on rapidly warping composition paper. Julian accompanies four amazingly executed hyper-realist paintings, that for all the world appear to be actual collages, with a real collage that is entirely free of glue mess and warping. In his paintings, Hummers fly through the air over drum sets, and an atomic bomb explodes from a convertible Hummer as it plunges into the water behind a surfer. A schmaltzy trompe l’oeil gold frame invades the interior of a canvas. Rock star stage fantasy images compete with advertising images. It’s bizarre, campy and fun.

Shelagh Leutwiler has produced a large and simply illustrated environmental installation about the destruction produced by coal mining. Dozens of small water media paintings of topped mountains and segments of ruined ecosystems form a wall grid that is interspersed with text statements and more involved educational information.

Carley Matthews places mixed media drawing techniques directly on distorted photos printed in large, panoramic format on matt paper. Indistinct shapes co-exist with feet and interior architectural elements, and the use of muted colors complements the dark earth tones of the original prints.

Bobbie Crews’ series of loose, colorful water media abstracts also contain elements of indistinct representational forms. They could be botanical or anatomical in origin, but it is how they relate with the dynamics of the abstract composition that is important.

Brenna Board’s minimalist installation is the last contribution in this absorbing exhibit. White cubes containing empty white books and a stack of weeds rest next to a large, folded yellow canvas that rests on the floor. Such a spare presentation is an interesting contrast to the highly detailed work of the architecture majors, whose work is also on display here.

This is the second year that the work of the art and architecture students has been seamlessly integrated together. For years they were installed in formally separate spaces, as if any contact might cause contamination of the disciplines. The new approach is truly enriching. The massive blueprints of the architectural and land work renderings, along with scale model buildings, proclaim their own right to a place in complete proximity to serious art. Their sculptural and graphic elements provide a wonderful complement to the paintings, drawings and photography, and I hope the Ewing keeps up the practice of blending the work of the two different departments in this annual exhibit.

The 2007 Honors Exhibit runs through June 28.
Summer Ewing Gallery hours are Mon.-Thurs., 11:00-4:00.