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CEPA hosts UB Visual Studies first year masters candidates

Growing Sensibilities

photos by Rose Mattrey

“Interstices” means “an intervening space, a chink, a crevice.” The student artists exhibiting at CEPA Gallery connect in their awareness of a general unease about the future, the relative impermanence of burgeoning technologies, the permanence of personal choices, the futility of serving the past, and a closeness with nature that changes the presumption from animals are like us to we are like them. The images in the show reverberate with the rhythms of Father Time’s beat box and fix the specificities of life’s delicate intimacies like dots on a map.

The work presented by these eight candidates is well worth the extra elevator ride to the third floor of the venerable Market Arcade building. Beautifully sky-lit, it is an excellent exhibition forum, with maximum advantage going to wall art.

In the current “the body as foil” expressionist arts is the massive wad of plaster, straw, and tar formed into a vaginal, egg- or football-shaped vessel. The accompanying video is both disturbing and rudely humorous at once: A microphone attachment makes audible every grunt and sigh made during construction, as the artist works on his knees, submerged up to his shoulders in tar in a parody of husbandry. At the opening someone gave the piece a kick and the rent plaster lies where it fell.

Hung in the windows facing the trellised balcony are large plastic discs grommeted and strung in pairs depicting invasive surgical procedures. Shown are cropped, digitized photographic enlargements of scenes which the viewers gradually may come to realize are close-up and very personal documentations of the “boob job,” “tummy tuck,” and feature realignments the artist endured. Quizzically compelling, these works are framed in a filigree of red lace like a valentine or sexy panties. One huge, impossibly raw nipple sums up the experience, sequestered in a frisket of surgical tape as if to say “suck only me.”

These students are apprenticing in archiving a “lived” experience through the metaphors of visual art. Using reverie, analysis, and raw visceral data, they portray the human acts of primping and preening and finding migratory cross-references to nesting patterns and bedroom domesticities. They chart birth-order on family breeding trees, hang a paper funeral dress with literal footprints sketched at the hem like anchors to the past, and frame the milieu of human detritus in an endless expanse of whiteout. This is a show that suggests these students are coming of age in their art. And it’s still only their first year.

The show continues through April 27.

j. tim raymond

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