Interwoven

Now in its third year, Santa Fe University of Art
and Design (SFUAD) retains distinctive characteristics of the
College of Santa Fe—which occupied the space for decades
and was heavy on arts education—yet it feels implacably
hipper than its predecessor. SFUAD, with its fun-to-say
acronym, says it maintains the values and aims of CSF, and
now intends to “develop the byways of [our students’] lively
and astute imaginations,” pluckily describing itself as “a
fearless and nimble leader in creative arts higher education.”
Corny vision statements aside, my impression of the student
body, gleaned from a handful of surprisingly well-attended
school-sponsored concerts and events, is that they’re a
diverse and keenly creative bunch. Interwoven, a four-person
senior thesis exhibition on view late this spring, bolstered this
sense. The quartet of artists in this lively and cerebral show
weren’t your typical group of college seniors, even by art
school standards.

New Mexico native Evalina Montoya’s reductive,
textural paintings covered one of the gallery’s walls. White,
streaky gesso in haphazard strokes, applied to a handful of
modestly sized squares and rectangles, suggested the hand
of an artist who is refreshingly unpreoccupied with the
sleek Minimalist associations her work otherwise invokes.
Nevertheless, her paintings are stridently simple, evincing a
charmingly unaffected quality.

Young Elliot Rogers’ presentation was sensitive and
intelligent. A suite of half a dozen or so paintings were hung
in one of the gallery’s alcoves, and they displayed a spacey
earnestness. Rendered in bright, sometimes spastic colors, the
works are diminutive (one was postcard-size and rather boldly
occupied an entire section of white wall) and thematically
mythic or spiritual: triangular symbols, exuberant figures,
fecund mountains. Eyeballs are everywhere: rising beyond
hilltops, sprouting from tree branches, and incorporated into
kaleidoscopic patterns. Rogers’ triumphantly trippy installation
piece, Vision Pyramid, sat squarely in a small, darkened room just
off the gallery entrance, a space that wonderfully underscored
the weirdness of the central object. Its sturdy fiberboard
construction was covered all over in lively animation, thanks to
on overhead projector that looped psychedelic moving-image
sequences onto the pyramid’s walls.

In Friendship in the Age of Facebook, artist Hannah Hoel,
who writes for THE magazine, made two hundred and thirtytwo
friendship bracelets, one for each of her Facebook friends.
In a process she describes as meditative and sometimes tedious,
Hoel wove the bracelets alone, using thread whose colors
were based on friends’ profile cover photos. In examining
the way relationships and social interactions are affected by
the Internet, Hoel exposed the inevitable paradoxes of social
network friendships, which can be severed—or at least made
exponentially more awkward—by an errant click of a button,
in the form of a tactless post or an unanswered friend request.
Pinning each of the bracelets to a photo taken from friends’
social network profiles, Hoel encouraged her contacts to come
to the opening to claim their bracelets, via—what else?—a
Facebook event invitation. In this way, Hoel’s project was a
cunningly contemporary creative exercise, and the exhibition
was a rare opportunity for artist and viewer interaction.
The body of black-and-white photographs in Cheye
Pagel’s Reveal series is visceral and intimate. On her Website,
the artist writes that she typically takes pictures of places and
things, but for her senior thesis project she turned the lens
on herself, and in doing so tapped into memories and past
experiences that immediately strike the viewer as difficult
ones. In one shot the artist’s eyes are pried open with scotch
tape, elsewhere her face is covered with writing. Bondage is an
overarching theme, manifesting in shots of Pagel blindfolded or
with her wrists bound in rope. These admirably bold portraits
depict the artist at her most raw and most vulnerable. In her
earnest and moving artist statement, Pagel explains that years
of mental and physical abuse inform the photographic series,
and she acknowledges that the photographs are “intensely
personal” but goes on to express hope that they will “resonate
with those who have gone through similar things.”
Interwoven showcased the work of four very different, very
driven artists. If this show is any indication, Santa Fe University
of Art and Design is a destination for creative talent—and a
burgeoning hotspot for provocative events and exhibitions.

—Iris McLister