Students and professors alike could be found hobnobbing Friday night at the Jonson Gallery opening that featured artwork from UNM graduate students.
The show is the eleventh annual Juried Graduate Student Exhibition.
"The show fosters student work," said Rhiannon Mercer, a second-year graduate student in painting and drawing whose work, "Seepage," was in the show.
Elysia Poon, a graduate student in art history and the editor of the show's catalogue, said the show provided a great way for people studying art and art history to collaborate.
The winner of the Friends of Art Prize was Jess Dunn, a first-year graduate student, for her mixed media installation "The Ornithology of War," which displays over 2,000 names of those who have died in Iraq.
"I wanted to create a space of memoriam, because it's hard to realize the actuality of war," Dunn said.
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Dunn will be giving a talk about her work on April 26 at 5:30 p.m.
Other winners were Jennifer Nehrbass, who won the Florence Henri Prize for her painting "Girls with Teeth in the Wrong Places," and Eloisa Guanlao, who won the Ana Mendieta Prize for her work, "L'exposition universelle." Both artists will speak about their work - Nehrbass on April 21 at 5:30 p.m. and Guanlao on April 14 at 5:30 p.m.
Guanlao's piece is made up of a series of photographs taken with a pinhole camera, which can only be viewed by looking through a view camera. She said her artwork is interactive because she wants the viewer to feel self-conscious.
"I explore issues of colonialism," Guanlao said. "The ideas behind colonialism are still pertinent today, especially because of the war in Iraq."
Other artists include Damon Sauer and Tracy Stuckey, both third-year graduate students. Stuckey's paintings are "Jesse" and "Body 8."
"I explore the physicality of both paint and the human body," Stuckey said. "They are confrontational pieces about how we view the human body."
"Jesse," was created from images of scars and birthmarks and is exactly 21 square feet.
"Twenty-one square feet is the average amount of skin on a person's body," he said.
Sauer's pieces, "Dissolution I and II," are made from gelatin silver prints, Plexiglas and resin, he said. "Dissolution I" features about 1,500 current pictures of himself, Saucer said, while "Dissolution II" is made from the first picture ever taken of him when he was a baby.
"My art is about how photos give us a sense of who we are," he said. "From the moment we're born, we have a history in photographs."
The show will run through May 6.
UNM Juried
Graduate Student
Exhibition
Jonson Gallery
Through May 6
