by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
UNM artists of every conceivable stripe - photographers, painters, performance artists and so on - will gather to showcase their work.
There will be an art exhibit at Jonson Gallery to introduce the works of 22 first-year graduate students to the art program. The students come from all over the country, including New Mexico.
"It gives us a chance to monitor how they're doing through their tenure at UNM," said Chip Wear, curator.
The show features five students in photography, seven in painting and drawing and three in printmaking. There are also seven people in three-dimensional art, which includes performance video as well as sculpture.
Andrew Crooks came from Iowa for the photography program.
"UNM has one of the top photography programs in the country," he said. "UNM has a great balance between the historical context of photography mixed with the cutting-edge faculty that produces really great studio work."
Crooks said he works with painted backdrops and three-dimensional props and combines it with portraiture.
"They're fun to look at," Crooks said. "I don't really create dark, eerie, on-the-edge type photographs. They're usually more colorful, bright, almost cartoonlike. I try to keep the subject matter uplifting."
He said art gallery scenes are pretty weird in general - everyone is fairly uncomfortable. He doesn't want people to feel that way when they encounter his exhibits.
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"If kids walk into a gallery and look at my work," he said, "I want it to bring a smile to their face."
Sara Pomerance is also a photographer, hailing from Washington, D.C.
She said a major theme in her work deals with the tension between impulse and learned behavior. She wants to know who we are beneath all the constructs of society.
"We spend a lot of time acting in ways we've been instructed to do so, and that's not the whole of ourselves," she said. "We have these great mindscapes that aren't expressed through the kind of conditions of society."
She said the more we try to control ourselves, the more our impulses will probably push up against that.
She places her subject matter outside because there are more organic forms and breathing space.
"My goal would be that in the images there's a breadth of possibilities," she said. "Something funny to something disturbing, something beautiful to something gross."
She is weary of intellectual jargon and mainly wants people to engage emotion when coming upon her work, she said.
"There is more to life than being clever," she said.
Robert Rainey is another photographer. He said he comes from all over, mainly Los Angeles and New York.
With his work, he puts himself in photographs of other people's families.
"I put ads out to photograph families, and in exchange I make art," he said. "I photograph their family and then I take a member of their family out and reconceptualize the family by photographing myself in that family."
He said he's exploring the family of 2005, which he characterizes as families with working mothers, single parents, two dads and two moms.
"They're each going to bring half a dozen slides or so and tell us what their ideas are," Wear said. "It's kind of a marathon presentation, but it's a good way to get a sense of the group."
