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Freshmen furtively guzzled wine and cheese in corners. Professors mingled in their coats and ties, and reporters lamely scribbled in their notebooks. The commotion took place Friday night, with the Wash U School of Art behind it all. The occasion was the Core and Chock Your Truck shows, which hit the Bixby and Des Lee galleries, respectively.
Core’s Bixby-wide exhibit showcased coursework to date for the Core Program, an intensive foundation in art for freshman and sophomores. Elements featured were as disparate as Juan Tejedor’s skull-ridden environment drawing and Anna Johnson’s digital prints.
The Chock Your Truck show featured upperclassmen’s paintings, and a massive spread of vegetables and wine for the of-age. The differences between the two could be best understood through the anecdote of the cheese. Core was freshman Brian Smeets with bare hands in a tub; Chock Your Truck was cubes on toothpicks. With garnish.
This is not to say the Core show was poorly put together or lacking in content. On the contrary, the variety and caliber impressed even such cynical viewers as the absurdist club. It was a taste of what is to come from emerging Wash U artists, while Chock Your Truck showed just how far the art students had come since they began their Wash U studies.
For those who have never ventured down Bixby-ways, the CORE program is, according to professor John Sabraw, “boot camp for artists” in which first and second year art students “get all the most basic, fundamental tools to develop, think about, and make [their] own work. The first year is focuses on drawing, “hard-core, intense drawing,” 2-dimensional design, 3-dimensional design, and the second year “opens up the mediums, allows people to explore… to the point of failure, so they can learn what works, what doesn’t.”
The Core show is an opportunity for students to flaunt their greatest works, and to show the public the array of talent present in the undergrad art program.
“I would add one thing-our students kick ass. They just do,” said Sabraw
The show does this, presenting a myriad of mediums and skill levels, which are, as Sabraw asserts,” very high.” Some highlights included Tomoko Ishii’s “Still Life with Tomoko and Oranges,” a vibrant self-portrait in acrylic, spraypaint, and colored pencil, Heather McPherson’s “Apology” in soft pastel, and Ahyon Chong’s Color Wheel Study for 2-D design. The study stars sultry visages of Bjork in various color motifs: blue, orange, etc.
Amy Beecher’s untitled drawing in prisma colored pencil demonstrates not only mastery of the medium, but also an interesting use of texture; the paper is pockmarked from an oddly fortuitous accident. “The picture fell out of its tube as I was walking to Bixby one day and got run over by a car,” relates Amy, “but I think it works…it may be my favorite part.”
Dwyer Kilcollin’s 3-D piece, “Stumpy Sneeze,” deals with the evolution from order to chaos and issues of organic matter. Dwyer explains, “[The assignment is supposed] to have three or more transformations from an ordered state to a chaotic state and then back to order again. And we’re also limited to work with plywood…I really was feeling something more organic…” The wooden piece both resembles and is about the size of a human torso, composed of vacuole-like parts attached with caulk.
“It’s supposed to be on chaos and order…when I was doing it I was looking…at different levels of structure, like looking in microscopes…every time you zoom, you come across a whole new layer of organization so the holes try to draw in the smaller level of cells with nuclei and they start “sneezing” off the top part and coming back to a kind of grid form.