Students draw on personal experiences, individuality in gallery exhibition
Fourth-year art student Gwyneth Bulawsky stands in front of her painting, "Ascension," which bridges Greco-Roman grandeur with transgender representation. (Jefferson Alade/Daily Bruin) The Undergraduate Juried Exhibition is shining a spotlight on bold, expressive individuality.
Selected by independent curator Suzy Halajian, the gallery kicked off Feb. 10 and will have pieces on display until Thursday following Halajian’s juror discussion Wednesday. Set in the UCLA Department of Art’s New Wight Gallery, the exhibition features mediums such as photography, paintings and short films.
Halajian said she was captivated by the idea of viewing oneself through the interrogation of race, gender and identity while putting the gallery together. Fourth-year art student Gwyneth Bulawsky said her featured painting “Ascension” was driven by the theme of rebirth, motivated by personal experiences from a few years prior.
“There were these wildfires up north, and my family lost our home to all these wildfires,” Bulawsky said. “All my old paintings, all my old drawings, everything that existed of me before all just burned. In a way, my painting is furthering those themes of being reborn and to start over again.”
While painting, Bulawsky said she was inspired by artists from the Greco-Roman era who placed particular emphasis on depicting the human figure, often in evocative spiritual contexts. To capture a similar aesthetic in her painting, Bulawsky said color selection was especially important, specifically while creating the heavenly skies that engulf much of the scene. Bulawsky said she also used a technique known as grisaille, a style of color layering she had originally learned while in community college.
“My professor would always make me paint my skies red first … a wash of red, brown, and then the blue sky on top of it,” Bulawsky said. “It gets this rich quality that you don’t really get by just putting blue on the canvas.”
Meanwhile, behind the theater curtains of the gallery is fourth-year art and art history student Shimine Douglas blending conventional and modern filmographic techniques. In her roughly five-minute short film “Family History,” Douglas overlays a screen capture of herself Googling her ancestry onto a collage of her family photos, creating an interplay between contemporary videography methods and traditional photography.
“What I like about the video is that, at its core, it’s about my family, but it’s not – there’s more to it,” Douglas said. “And that, to me, is important. I’m not just making some video diary about my life. I want it to be more universal.”
In the realm of photography, fourth-year art student Kimberly Gutierrez said she pushed novel creative boundaries to create her recent photo series. Gutierrez said her photograph from the series, “Double Frames,” marks a departure from her mostly black-and-white prior work. She employed a new technique called double exposure, one she hadn’t used before, which she said made the process an artistically formative experience.
“With this series, when I got my results back, I surprisingly fell in love with every picture that I took,” Gutierrez said. “There have been times … where I wouldn’t like every picture and only like two or three pictures. But for this roll of film, there was something so special to me. … It taught me to just take more chances and embrace mistakes, make mistakes and learn from them.” —Rishab Adulvahid, Feb 22, 2022
HEADER IMAGE: Fourth-year art and art history student Shimine Douglas stands in front of her video piece, “Family History,” on display in the Department of Art’s Undergraduate Juried Exhibition. (Jefferson Alade/Daily Bruin)
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Daily Bruin website.
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