Seniors give farewell show

Author: Lauren Smith

Painting, photography, sculpture and printmaking are all represented this week at a Senior Student exhibit in Johnson Gallery. The show, with works by Tyne Pike-Sprenger '05, Stina Marshall-Parr '05 and Sydney Atkins '05 is the culminating exhibit of the three Studio Art majors.

The show actually begins outside of Johnson Gallery in the open area in the center of the building. There, on the three thankfully repainted white walls, are several photographs and a Sharpie print by Marshall-Parr, two sculptures by Pike-Sprenger and a watercolor painting and oil painting by Atkins. The sculptures are the spotlight stealers of this section of the exhibit, with Pike-Sprenger's "Tapo," made of packing paper and paper towels stiffened with wall paste, and "Harpoon," a wood sculpture, beautifully building on the natural materials. Pike-Sprenger uses the consistencies of his materials to great success. Instead of creating a sculpture by mutilating the natural qualities of his materials, he uses the qualities to his advantage, gently shaping them to evoke a mountainous landscape in "Tapo" and a gently sloping boat-like form in "Harpoon."

The other standouts displayed in the central space of Johnson are Marshall-Parr's 35mm color photos. The photographs of surfers and ocean waves are nice technically superior action shots, even if they are a bit boring. Like Pike-Sprenger, Marshall-Parr uses the natural beauty in her subject matter to her advantage, capturing a wave at just the right moment to produce a photo that has an abstract quality, much like a painting. On the opposite wall to her photographs, Marshall-Parr displays a piece entitled "Fire," a photo collage of her own photographs of waves cut-out and pasted to evoke bright orange and red fire. The piece has a mythic quality to it, evoking Native American art, as the fire seems to morph into birds and other creatures as the viewer continues to gaze at the piece.

As the show continues into the Johnson Gallery, the work becomes even stronger. Pike-Sprenger's work dominates the room with a large wood, metal and stone piece entitled "Gates" in the center of the gallery. The artist uses a sugar maple slab, a rusted and contorted car fender found on Snake Mountain, a rock slab found in Wilmington, Vt. and barn door rollers discovered in West Dover, Vt. He frames the found objects - the car fender, the rock and the sugar maple slab - in a framework of machine-cut pine logs. The raw machine-cut pinewood is distracting and somewhat detracts from the natural beauty of the found objects. However, this seems to be the artist's intention. Objects shaped by nature, like the weathered car fender, are more beautiful than objects shaped by man.

The paintings by Atkins in the exhibit are few and far between, but his strongest piece of the ones displayed hangs in the gallery behind Pike-Sprenger's "Gates." "Beach Stones" is the name of the 20 ft. x 20 ft. oil painting. The stones are enlarged on the canvas and presented with the abstract colors seen on beach stones through clear water on a sunny day - yellow, orange, blue, green and pink. The enlargement of the stones is the strength of the painting, as it gives an interesting form to an otherwise dull subject.

Marshall-Parr displays more of her photographs in the gallery space. Again, her nature photos are the more intriguing. Her portraits seem too carefully composed. Her subjects pose in their clichéd get-ups - a punk kid smoking a cigarette in New York City and an elderly man sitting on the steps in the sun. How many times has that been done before? The artist's strongest piece hangs opposite her photographs. It is called "23 Days" and employs the mythic quality that made "Fire" so attractive. The work is a scroll, drawn by hand with a Sharpie marker. The lines are clean, fresh and technically fantastic. The scroll, read from left to right, presents the viewer with a narrative that weaves in and out of time and space. The events unfolding in the 15-foot- long scroll are so intriguing and complicated, one could spend hours absorbed in the story, not to mention simply admiring the expert craftsmanship. Marshall-Parr has taken Sharpie doodles to a whole new level.