The newest exhibits on display in the Brown/RISD Hillel gallery space feature the work of Assistant Professor of Visual Art Leigh Tarentino and RISD Assistant Professor Graham Day Guerra. Both shows opened on Jan. 23 and will run through Feb. 4.
Tarentino's exhibit, called "Recent Work," consists of watercolors, digital prints and oil paintings. A common theme woven through all the works is the use of fine lines in symmetrical arrangements. Her subject matter draws on urban symbols - traffic signs, telephone poles and the like - but almost always represents them monochromatically. Tarentino wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that she made this artistic choice to place "more emphasis on the geometry and linear quality of the composition, and to achieve a particular kind of dreamlike ambience that is distinct from everyday reality."
"The thread that runs through all of my work," writes Tarentino in the artist's statement available at the exhibit, "is about transforming elements of an archetypal modern American landscape into a fantastic imaginary world."
Indeed, Tarentino's work renders the familiar and mundane in a novel way, while still retaining characteristics recognizable to the viewer.
Employing spatial and proportional distortions, Tarentino links isolated fragments of city landscapes with telephone and electrical wires in a neat and graphic manner. She wrote in the e-mail that she was seeking to create "patterns from randomness." Her digital prints achieve this combination, playing with reflection and symmetry by showing the same vignettes - full of unrelated urban elements - from varying perspectives.
Tarentino's work aims to highlight the "unnoticed backdrop of daily life," according to her artist's statement, but some works in the show achieve their goals better than others. The oil paintings are striking and convey a fantastic mood, while the digital prints are harsher and in some ways less aesthetically pleasing. The prints are better admired from afar, where the composite effect of large-scale symmetry is more obvious.
Overall, however, Tarentino's work shows great attention to detail, allowing for representations that both stay true to her everyday subjects and depict them in unconventional ways.
Guerra's charcoal drawings revolve around the play of light. He contrasts graded softness of the illuminated human form with the sharpness of stadium lights. In depicting fetus-like skulls and arena light fixtures side-by-side, Guerra juxtaposes the primordial and the technological. The drawings show incomplete human bodies that repeat in overlapping patterns. The result is a series of images in which bodily elements look authentic when separated, but when grouped in each of Guerra's works make for a surreal sum of parts that is far from human.
Both artists show an interest in both the progressive and the quotidian, and though their portrayals are quite different, both send the message that there is much to be admired in the seemingly mundane.
