New Sacramento City College Art Faculty Showcased in Exhibit
By Victoria Dalkey
Published July 30, 2010
Sacramento Bee
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. So goes the old saying. But it is belied by “Summer in the City,” a show at Jay Jay by art faculty recently hired at Sacramento City College. “It’s a beacon of hope that Sacramento City College has new young recent hires when some institutions have cut their art faculties,” said Beth Jones, co-director of the gallery. “This show is a celebration of teachers that will be influential on the next generation of artists,” she added. Sacramento, which is rich in colleges and universities, has had a tradition of hiring practicing artists to guide their fine arts students, and SCC is no exception. The school, which will dedicate its new art building Sept. 2, has added four new full-time faculty members in the past few years, and their works at Jay Jay demonstrate the strength of their personal visions.
Mark Boguski, who received his master of fine arts from prestigious Alfred University in New York, is the new ceramics teacher at the college. He presents both free-standing and wall pieces at Jay Jay that relate to architecture and to the figure. They include “P. Wiggley,” a writhing, twisting, curvilinear wall piece, and “Aubrey,” a free-standing sculpture that suggests themes of revelation and enclosure in an architectural mode. While their titles are enigmatic, both are handsome pieces that have a strong presence in the gallery’s front area, especially “P. Wiggley,” which is burnished black like Oaxacan pottery. Rather than being glazed, however, its almost metallic surface is the product of hours of laborious marking with a stick of graphite, a feat in itself. Other strong pieces include the quirky, antic wall sculpture “Hurly, Burly” and the sensual, subtly colored “Green Structure.”
Mitra Fabian, an Iranian-born artist who earned her master of fine arts from California State University, Northridge, shows a series of elegant and luxurious sculptures that employ unusual materials. Contained, to a degree, in geometrical casings, her looping, folding, curling strips of wine labeling foil, both metallic and clear, speak of enclosure and release. The intricate folds of the cast-off material spill out of their strict enclosures, bursting out in looser reticulate formations that sometimes resemble the inner workings of the body, the folds of the brain, or the intricate bones of fossilized creatures. The metallic pieces are rich and celebratory, while the clear ones have the softness of tulle or chiffon, suggesting associations with feminine pursuits such as sewing and lace making. In addition to these, she shows an iceberglike sculpture made of plastic pipette tips. The tips come in two shades of blue set into a clear acrylic foundation that is hung from the ceiling so that the piece seems to float in the air. Again, it’s an intricate, labor-intensive work that projects an icy but imposing presence in the gallery.
Labor-intensive, too, are Gioia Fonda’s small paintings on wood, which are wonderfully intricate renderings of fabric designs in patterns reminiscent of paisley. Marvelously detailed, the paintings take advantage of the beauty of the wood grain, which in places seems to have been worked to create intricate patterns of whorls that play against the painted surfaces. Fonda, who earned her master’s degree in fine arts from the New York School of Visual Arts, also shows a series of new works in acrylic on canvas and charcoal on paper that focus on the kind of piles of cast-off junk that can be found on the streets of neighborhoods where many home foreclosures have occurred. These down-and-out conglomerations of the detritus of living are simultaneously representational and abstract and reminiscent thematically, though not formally, of some of the late works of Philip Guston. Like Fabian’s sculptures, which employ discarded or discontinued materials, Fonda’s imagery relates to our throwaway culture.
Emily Wilson, who received her master of fine arts degree from the University of Arizona, is a master printmaker whose large-scale etchings with drypoint are impressive examples of the techniques she uses. Combining pattern and void in a way that calls up associations with traditional Japanese painting and drawing, she gives us subtle and spare images that must be finished by the viewer. “Ashy Output” is a witty work in which rabbitlike creatures spew reddish smoke into the atmosphere over a platform set on a field of orange podlike forms. “Sunday Best” offers a form that might be a vessel or a skirt with marks that resemble extrusions spilling out. A delicate tint of pale blue gives a watery feeling to the interior of the vessel while the rich black markings violate the surface of the print in intriguing ways. Again, as in Fabian’s work, there is a feeling of enclosure and release.
The show is remarkable for the way in which the works of these four artists complement each other so well. They seem to share a number of concerns both thematically and formally, and all have an intense dedication to craft. For a group show, “Summer in the City” is remarkably cohesive. One must congratulate the curators Suzanne Adan, Mike Stevens and Anne Gregory, who are all longtime adjunct faculty members at SCC, for putting together such a fine show.
