Under the Radar: The 41st Rice Student Art Exhibition

The music is tense and anticipatory. On the TV screen, a series of men and women exchange looks of surprise, nervousness, fear, and incredulity, hair frozen in an amber of hairspray, makeup so thick it forms a cosmetic exoskeleton. They are soap opera stars.

Colin Elliot strung together a collection of wordless “meaningful glances” from American daytime stars and Mexican telenovella thespians. His resulting video My Drama Is Your Drama (2003) was one of the standouts in Under the Radar: The 41st Rice Student Art Exhibition, this year’s installment of the annual event that showcases the work of graduating visual arts majors.

Elliot, working with fellow student Andrew Hamblin, created his witty video by extracting and re-presenting carefully chosen scenes. The array of reaction shots becomes exponentially more ludicrous as one cheesy overacting star seemingly looks to another and another and another. . . . The repetitive audio track, performed by Mogwai, actually was used in one of the soap operas.

Hilary Wilder was the guest curator for this year’s student exhibition. Wilder is a critical studies and artist resident at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She presented the Director’s Choice Award to Christine Liang for Liang’s digital photograph Wordsearch (2004). In her artist’s statement, Liang reveals that, “What started as a simple color study in my color photography class has turned into somewhat of an obsession.”

Over the course of three years Liang created an alphabet from found objects. She looked for things that resembled letter shapes and then photographed them until she had a version of every letter. But she didn’t capture just any objects; Liang upped the difficultly level for herself by requiring that they also be bright yellow. A safety-yellow rubber boot became an “L,” the cup of a mustard colored bra became a “C.” “Over the past three years,” Liang confesses, “I have searched, accumulated, purchased, and borrowed countless yellow objects.”

She took her alphabet and arranged the letters in a seemingly randomly ordered grid. But if you look long enough, the letters begin to click, and you can pick out scattered words. Liang’s photographs are an intriguing collection of images that also happen to operate as text.

The straight photographs of Atsushi Suzuki were extremely strong. Suzuki has a fantastic eye for street scenes and captures them in lush, almost hyperreal color. An Osaka schoolgirl on a train, a mother and child walking out of a crowd into the Australian sun—Suzuki’s subjects are caught unawares, frozen in the act of going somewhere. She isolates and extracts rich moments from the banal and everyday.

Josef Sifuentes’s subjects directly confront the viewer. Sifuentes paints portraits of people from the Rice community. He has a strong sense of color and paints well-modeled figures with a slightly expressionist, sculptural feel. A woman with braids is rendered in the foreground of one work; behind her is a spare, flattened, and almost surreal landscape. At the horizon line, an ocher-colored mobile home sits bracketed by palm trees. Sifuentes’s eye for telling detail includes a hot water heater tank set up outside the trailer. Sifuentes received the Mavis C. Pitman Memorial Prize in Studio Art from the Department of Visual Arts.

A rickety secondhand treadmill was drafted into service for Jason Pallas’s Treadmill: That’s Bad for You (2004). Pallas wallpapered the treadmill’s belt with cigarette packs. It looks like a pretty straightforward comment on health and fitness until you read Pallas’s artist statement, which says, “According to environmental activists, running the outer loop surrounding Rice University at rush hour measured in inhaled carcinogenic particles is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes.” Yikes. You imagine jogging on Pallas’s treadmill and churning smoke into you lungs.

Decathlete/artist Ryan Harlan had his own take on athletics and art. His sculpture Incomplete Whole (2003) used a graduated series of forms that called to mind track hurdles. They started with a small block and moved to inverted u-shapes. Harlan crafted his modernist-looking objects from wood and painted them a dark, purple-tinged hue. He displayed his sculpture on a mirror-topped pedestal. The forms reflected themselves and the piece changed when viewed from different angles—levitating like stair steps or concentrically receding into space depending on your point of view.

From daytime television to track and field, Under the Radar presented works as diverse and individual as the students who created them.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer