Eye of the Beholder
Over the weekend, the School of Visual Arts threw a casual cocktail reception on the ground floor of the campus gallery in the artsy Chelsea neighborhood to fete the launch of their second annual Summer Residency Program Alumni Exhibit.
This year’s exhibition, aptly titled “Condition X”, brings together the multiple disciplines offered by the program as represented in a common thread seen in their work. Held at the Westside Gallery, the event features forty hand-selected works of art from past participants of the Summer Residency Program. This year’s fresh crop of exhibitors —Nate Burbeck, Marcos Chin, Barnett Cohen, Annika Connor, Grayson Cox, Sarah Dineen, Tomer Exterman, Marc Freeman, Emiliano Granado, Annette Isham, Apryl McAnerney, Carolina Moscoso, William Nelson, Iviva Olenick, Jeremy Olson, Maria Petrovskaya, Jonathan Reid Sevigny, Ilona Szwarc and George Towne—come from all over to participate.
The art exhibition, curated by alumnus and program coordinator in the Division of Continuing Education Keren Moscovitch, focused on theme of the human condition in all forms, love, sex, death, passion, religion for an intense deep human experience.
“I am really pleased with the exhibit because it really represents the energy of the residency program. It represents the energy of collaboration, integration, and multi-disciplinary and bringing people together. That’s what I really I love,” gushes Keren Moscovitch. “I enjoy having multiple pieces from a lot of the artists because I think it gives a better sense an artist’s full body of work or a particular project as oppose to a single image from each piece.”
The cross disciplinarian show has everything from painting to photography to video to sculpture to illustrators. Several artists utilize traditional and, some might say, romantic media, creating a tension between “soft” studio practice and the quick, contemporary communications that happen in a global society dominated by social networking Web sites, blogs and interactivity. The exhibition includes dainty handmade narrative embroideries that act as an old-world “blog” by Iviva Olenick; lush watercolors of embracing figures from a passionate New York by Annika Connor; humanoid beasts exploring lifecycles by Apryl McAnerney who also happen to sporting the new feather trend for fall fashion; the distorted image of desire and fantasy in today’s blurred reality by Jeremy Olson; as well as tortured abstractions evoking human viscera removed from the body by Sarah Dineen.
Guests sipped their choice of San Pellegrino, Charles Shaw Blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc as well as ginger ale and Coca-Cola as they mixed with the faculty and participants. Some were even took advantage of Grayson Cox’s funcitional piece that provided people with a place to charge their cell phones with plugs for your Blackberries and iPhones.
What began 30 years ago with a group of students who were interested in staying during the summer and continuing their studio practice has blossomed into a whole residency program, geared towards professional artists that are out of school with an established practice. Now in its 29th year, the Summer Residency Program at SVA has a total of 155 students who come to New York for the summer to work in an ideal studio space who automatically become a part of the SVA family network.
“It’s like art camp,” says Moscovitch who has been running the program for 8-years and is excited about the new exhibit. “It (SVA) is like a family. Artists come here to gain access to our facility, faculty, and professional network of lecturer and consultants. After they complete the program, we keep in touch with them. We see what they are up to and a lot of them are very very active in the art world all over the world. The exhibit is really representative of the kind of energy and the kind of professional experience that alumni end up having in the art world.”
The SVA exhibition: Condition X, will be on view now through August 20th at the Westside Gallery located at 133/141 West 21st Street between 6th and 7th Avenue in New York City.
To join their mailing list and receive updates on this and future events, contact Keren Moscovitch at (212) 592-2188 or kmoscovitch@sva.edu, check them out on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.