a vivid start

Beginnings starts off this Gallery Vault season with a bang, or maybe it would be more appropriate to term it a splash, as the vibrancy of color seems to be a major theme here. Diverse student artists are represented in the show, but each presents their (usually painted) work as an attack of pigment on the viewer.

   

This kind of work is pretty representative of the painting that's coming out of the department these days, and it's refreshing to see a shift from the more cool and conceptual type of art that's been common. There's not anything wrong with work that engages primarily with ideas over form, and all work does both to a degree, but ideas have been a bit over-represented compared to medium and the physicality of materials. It's interesting, but a broader discussion than we can have here.

Suffice it to say that anyone interested in the Cloud art scene can expect more of this work out of GV, especially considering the next show is new works from Brittany Oman. Britt's paintings seem to have a depth and complexity somewhat separate from the formal quality of the paint that she uses. It comes, I believe, from an interaction with title. This reminds me of the tesseract and other four-dimensional geometries, for example. We await the rest with trepidation.