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Multiple joys unfold as multiple artists rock the end of undergrad college careers at the Senior Show, University of New Hampshire Art Gallery in Durham. Highpoints and highlights are manifest. The show's got depth: no clone production, or teacher suck-up knock-offs. Every choice and "voice" is distinct, and there's a very nice balance of two- and three-dimensional work ranging from exquisite sculptural/functional teapots and furniture to mad abstracts of enormous proportion. Haven Leask's stoneware hat, bag and boots make tangible objects in sculptural "resurrections" and move them from actual to mythological in tenor. Whacked series of antlers and skulls infer deformity, mutation and utter uniqueness (perhaps even jackelope). Ashley E. Shoukimas' handmade photography stands alone and out. Her poetic words overlay a silky translucent slip on hand-prepared watercolor photo-paper. The slip serves as both as the central visual metaphor of the poem and her photographic "negative" through which the light's exposure recreates the image. "A Body of Air" results as a narrative of entropy, a figurative dissolving. Emily Leonard's oils ("Blue Studio," "A Window View") on canvas are brash and angular, multifaceted. Mostly studio work, the angles, mirrors, windows, easels and figures create a complex geometry. Arms reach around corners, mirrors fragment and fracture images, frames contextualize and isolate. Blues, greens and creamy tans dominate canvases filled with intent and intense women painting; a quiet, inferred kinetics. Mihee Yeom's "Karma," at 60 by 71 inches, explores color and texture and interrogates the darker end of the color spectrum. Interplays of blue and deep purple blur and whirl into blacks and bronzes. Two islands of texture, palette knife-applied, vie for attention while the rest of the canvas seems polished or burnished. The piece shows exquisite color sense and unique work. Charles Byron's landscape/still life combos full of smeary, smudgy flowers, bright splashes of color; larger canvases most enjoyable and floral, one's eye hopping like a sparrow in the rain. "Long Hard Look," Mathilde Landberg's oil on board, reveals a gorgeous tomboy with smoky blue-grey eyes and sculptural spikey-dykey hair, under a Creamsicle orange b-girl cap tipped at a decidedly jaunty angle. Trisha Coates' earthen and stoneware teapots are life-size, lifelike objets d'art: a triad of corn cobs; a sprouting onion with delicate onionskin peeling and sprout spout; a verdant, jughead-esque crown of asparagus, and, artily, an artichoke. One longs for Lapsang Souchong, pine needle-smoked tea, to sip from a baby artichoke cup. The University of New Hampshire Senior Show will be on display through May 21 at the Art Gallery, Paul Creative Arts Center, 30 College Road, Durham, 603-862-3712. |