SUNY Purchase Student Shows

I went to two shows of student work at SUNY Purchase in the past two weeks, as my daughter Gillian will graduate next semester. The first was a group show she was in at the Neuberger Museum. Gillian said “Come to the opening tomorrow night”. It all happened so quickly, the show was up over one weekend and then gone. It was a ground breaking event, this was the first time the Neuberger Museum ever hosted a student show in the forty year history of the school.
Most of the show took place outdoors in a court yard, sculpture and some paintings hung on a fence. My favorite piece outside was by John Kish, a small canon with camouflage painting. The artist was dressed in top hat and tails. Following his habit of wearing 19th C. Eastern European military uniforms on a daily basis throughout his college career. Gillian's painting,“Creation is Myth” hung directly opposite the entrance of a gallery just off the main lobby . It is painted with acrylic and oil paint on wood panel 36”x 48”. She has developed a style of figurative expressionism with abstract backgrounds. Her figures are often dismembered with the intention of creating psychological metaphor. I see her as practicing a very brave, daring, gutsy brand of painting with a well developed visual vocabulary.
The second show was an installation sculpture by Roberta Jones. Presented in the arte povera style, using paper, fabric, wooden structures and photography she documents her own ritualistic space definition. What makes her work particularly satisfying is that her piece is so claustrophobic and her scale of photography is large
enough that you leap into the space of the photographs with abandon. I am a fan of work that makes you forget where you are and takes you on a journey into the piece.
Gillian and Roberta have been friends throughout their college careers. Roberta would come to visit Gillian at my house when they were off from school. On one occasion three years ago they were critiquing Gillian’s paintings in my studio. I joined in the conversation and eventually Gillian described Roberta’s work. This inspired me to talk about standing stones in the British Isles and Joseph Beuys. Which sparked me to reread my journal from 1979 when I traveled with Edinburgh Arts to Scotland, England and Ireland, and where I experienced the stones and Beuys' work first hand. The combination of this conversation and rereading the journal was the catalyst for me to persue an understanding of all I could about Beuys. Further it got me to speak with John Bjerklie about Beuys, and he connected me to Sean Lynch (who has created several documentary style pieces about Beuys), and whom I visited while I was Ireland in 2007. This eventually inspired me to go back to visit Edinburgh when I was on that same trip. I cherish these connections, chance circumstances and converstaions with artists.