OU student show features sculpture, video and more
A video asks us to “Make Sense,” clay pillows may help us sleep, and wire and thread tell a story in three award-winning works.
They are in the art student show of the University of Oklahoma at OU’s Fred Jones Junior Museum of Art, 555 Elm Ave.
The “Make Sense” title seems to have two contradictory meanings in the video by Yue Fang, which won the $800 T.G. Mays Purchase Award.
A clawed hand being drawn makes scratch marks, bubbles audibly bubble, a lemon falls on ice cubes and pyramid spikes self-destruct in Fang’s video. Courtney Segrest won the $1,000 Oscar Jacobson Award for a black metal sculpture called “Thoughts Untouched for a Time.”
In Segrest’s work, two black metal openwork structures resemble four- and five-story high buildings in progress, strung with thin black thread.
Comparing the thread to drawing ink and the metal to the page, Segrest said it tries to tell a story of life, growth and change, “left open to the viewer.”
Christina Garcia won a $600 FJJMA Award for “Elements of Sleep,” a work consisting of four tiny, minimally decorated clay pillows, on small pedestals.
“Dreams help process our emotions,” Garcia said. “We hold them, hug them, cry or even scream into them,” and “we all sleep with them.”
Mayumi Kiefer won the $400 Ben Whitney FJJMA Docent Award for a striking, life-size, armored, samurai-like figure, seated on black cloth, beside a tea bowl.
Kiefer used stoneware, brocade, cord and thread to create the masked figure, which pays homage to “one of the few women that obtained the title of Daimyo in Japan.”
Winning the $400 Susan Baley Docent Award was Danielle
Weigandt for a ceramic installation called “The Fourth Event.”
Weigandt said the small openwork clay cubes and even smaller, closed clay cubes, are an attempt to give form to time, making “a seemingly invisible event, visible.”
Jurored by Douglas Shaw Elder, Norman artist and director of Firehouse Art Center, the 104th annual student show is highly recommended in its run through May 13.