Ten one-way streets, five missed turns and three blocks later, I finally arrive at the 10th Street lofts where Art St. Louis is showing off its fresh produce.
Aptly called Varsity Art VII, the exhibit is a showcase of art by 26 graduate and undergraduate students in the area.
Fontbonne College, Maryville University, University of Missouri-St. Louis, Webster University, the St. Louis Community Colleges, Washington University and Saint Louis University are among the 15 schools represented.
Forget the cold, sparsely decorated loft. The artworks themselves splash life into the otherwise dim room.
Images of people and places range from dark and intense to surreal and colorful to dramatic and spiritual.
Artists used a variety of mediums – include watercolor, charcoal, acrylic, pastel and photography. Several mixed media pieces go all out, making use of glass, muslin, dirt and blood, as in St. Louis Community College (at Florissant) Marsha Rose’s interesting “Suspended Animation.” Rose also fascinates with “Process,” another mixed media artwork that consists of four boxes, each representing the stages of creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification.
One of the immediately visible works belong to Oliver Vogt of McKendree College, who put together a human form using only chunks of wood, nails and glue. Other remarkable works include the beautiful “beaten, branded, bruised, battered” salt-fired stoneware by C. Andrew Rohde of Lindenwood University.
Debra Broz of Maryville University presents a dark and earthy “documentation of beauty” through images of decaying elements “preserved” on 20 panels.
Jeremiah Joseph Yu of Webster University garners attention from one corner with his whimsical figures on “George, Sandy and the Big Mountain,” whose brown tones are perhaps influenced by his childhood in the Philippines.
Resting on another wall is Yu’s “Loosely Based on a Deer-Death Experience,” an intense dark-toned piece priced at $700, along with the note: “I will not negotiate with terrorists.”
This exhibit isn’t called “Varsity Art” for nothing. Traces of college thesis-like intelligence are evident, especially in UMSL’s Christopher Harris’ “Trampling Upon the Earth,” a digital print depicting-and explaining quite profoundly-human destruction of the environment.
Then there is Washington University student Donald Cameron’s “More Than Anything Else, I Want You to Respect Me.”
In his oil painting of what looks like digital worms, Cameron descends into the crevices of “Deeper Meaning.” The painting shows, “Two digital intelligences [that] recoil and examine each other,” resulting in a moment that is a “microcosm of the emotional manifesto of each entity, and [the] dissection of its elements will lead to a greater insight into the tentative understanding between both parties.”
Whew. Talk about an intellectual intercourse.
SLU junior Erin Burke makes a niche for herself with two charcoal/Xerox transfer drawings, on which she freezes a moment and magnifies a certain aspect of that moment.
“Goodbye” is a striking portrait of love through a pair of hands clutching a letter, a moment universal and timeless.
Meanwhile, “Defiance” juxtaposes a rather blurry group of students with a close-up image of a girl who stands out, hands crossed, with an air of rebelliousness. Another classic.
Refreshing, intelligent, sincere, and sometimes poetic, Varsity Art VII is definitely worth your time. I walked out still thinking about their emotional manifestoes.
