Review: OU student art recommended for viewing visit

Published: April 7, 2006

NORMAN -- A face made of circular squiggles of paint, superimposed over an abstract composition of flat, pastel-hued, rectangular planes, provides the focal point of a work that won one of two top prizes in the University of Oklahoma Art Students' Exhibition.

Jenks junior Paul Kriley won the $1,000 Oscar B. Jacobson Award for "I Am So Me I Feel Frumpy," a large oil canvas that strikes an uneasy, quixotic balance between non-objective and figurative elements.

On view in OU's Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, the 92nd annual students' show was jurored by Richard Townsend, director of the Price Tower Art Center in Bartlesville, in consultation with Fred Jones Jr. Museum director Eric Lee.

Winning the $1,000 T.G. Mays Purchase Award was Shawnee graduate student Tony Tiger for "Pilgrims," a composition on wood and masonite using acrylics and digital images.

A repetitive geometric design motif, rather like a linoleum floor pattern, gives way to a cut-out, lower-level square on which we find what appears to be an old family photo, with a red square around one of the children, in Tiger's puzzle-like painting-construction.

A small, organic, almost sea shell-like shape suggests "Serenity" in an understated plaster-and-enamel work by Oklahoma City sophomore Nicci Matheson, who won one of two $500 John R. Potts Sculpture Awards.

Dark, compact, closed, inscrutable, menacing and offering a nice contrast to Matheson's creation is "Wood Louse," a plaster sculpture by Oklahoma City senior Duff Bassett that won the second $500 Potts Award.

A dark plaster bust of a woman is displayed not on a pedestal but turning away from us, arbitrarily framed by and seemingly trapped inside a wooden corner, in "Blind Alley," a work by Oklahoma City junior Kalin Morrow.

Morrow won the Joe Taylor Figurative Sculpture Award for a foam-on-plaster creation called "Complete."

Wonderfully seductive and subliminally threatening is a large, vertically hung acrylic painting of a pale, slender young man named "Aaron," clad only in underpants and holding a "shining axe" on his shoulder.

"Aaron" won one of two $500 Museum Association Awards for Tulsa senior Nat McKnight.

Edmond senior Brent Goddard won the other Museum Association Award for a silent video called "Pieces."

"Pieces" starts with imagery of an arm, interspersed with a depiction of tweezers reaching for a blue bead that eventually becomes part of a larger, abstract composition suggesting something one might see under a microscope.

Winning the $500 Mainsite Contemporary Art Award was Bartlesville junior Jared Gomez for "Metalanguage #2," a video also with no sound in which gleaming colored lines flash past, like something seen from a moving vehicle.

Oklahoma City senior Carolyn Rossow won one of two $350 Fred Jones Jr. Museum Docent Awards for a touchingly candid closeup color photo of a boy named "Jacob."

The other went to Seminole graduate student Angela Evans for an installation in which a piece of paper on an empty, rusted metal bed frame, under a ribbed arch of bone-like concrete shapes, suggests the "Death of Religious Ideology."

Kristen Vails uses gesso, medium, paint and loose, gestural brush strokes to suggest a small herd of moving horses in "Hydra" and a bucking horse with two heads sharing a single body in "Wheel 'Round."

Vails won a $250 FJJMA "Body of Work" award for the two, large, striking, mixed-media paintings.

The OU student show is recommended viewing during its run through April 23 at the museum.

John Brandenburg