Art studio graduate students Megan Jacobs, Naomi Shersty and Senseney Lea Stokes have been very busy this semester.
After a collaborative September art show in Santa Fe and an art history trip to Cuba in October, the three are again busy showing their work at Albuquerque's AC2 Gallery.
The show, "Latent: Body Memory," investigates shared themes within their collective work, like memory, personal history and female identity.
"In talking with Senseney and Megan, we all realized that we had similar elements that we work with," Shersty said.
And although the three students work with different subjects and execute their ideas in diverse ways, nothing could be closer to the truth.
Jacobs's photography is beautiful and simple. In one piece, she uses jars, boxes, teeth, salt and dirt to revisit family memories. In a series called "Re-envisioning Home," Jacobs creates lightjet prints of video stills in which a mattress lies in unusual places.
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"It's about memory and re-envisioning the past," Jacobs said. "It's about using new environments to explore past memory."
Stokes said she uses her work to question the past with family photographs. She uses her own family photos and removes herself from them in an effort to erase the past and create a new one. She said she can't even remember being in some of the childhood photos.
"It's kind of a denial of history," Stokes said. "It's dealing with presence, but feeling not present."
In other works, collectively called "Toward," Stokes deals with conscious and unconscious thought and the confrontation between the two. Through self-portraits, Stokes creates soft, feminine images with two figures who she says are aware of one another, but aren't making a connection. The psychological tension in the images mixed with the soft texture and color schemes is stunningly whimsical.
Shersty's work is rich in color and each piece carries with it an uncomfortable occurrence of water. In a series called "Dredging Spring," Shersty plays with the viewer's thoughts on beauty and danger coexisting in her images. She revisited bodies of water she had frequented when she was a child in Florida and used a video camera to film herself underwater.
"One thing I like to work with is the sublime qualities of self," Shersty said.
Beyond her photography, Shersty produced a 3-minute movie, "Watershed," which deals with her theme of water and really ties all three students' artwork together. It perfectly combines Jacobs's simplicity, Stokes' whimsical dream-like state and of course, Shersty's push-and-pull tension.
Michael Certo, AC2 curator, said he appreciated the quality of the students' work. He was especially impressed with how well Shersty's video reflects the tones and lyrical nature of the images.
"What I always look for is that whatever medium the artist is using, that they are pushing the boundaries," Certo said.
Without a doubt, the works of Jacobs, Stokes and Shersty do exactly that.
The What, When and Where
What: "Latent: Body Memory"
When: Thursday through Sunday
12-5 p.m.
Price: Free
Where: AC2 Gallery
310 Mountain Rd. NE
Tickets and info: 842-8016
