University Art Museum’s annual art students’ survey aces the test
By Theo Douglas

AMPARO OCHOA, “RETABLITOS”

For some, the University Art Museum will always have a strike against it: its location on the Cal State Long Beach campus—the association with students and their work somehow tainting it, reducing it alongside the professional museums/galleries in the real world when in fact the opposite should be true. It’s not that students are great artists, or that a university art museum is a great museum—but that both will always have that potential. “Insights: 2007,” the CSULB art department’s annual student art exhibition, proves that, yielding a show that—while not always the newest, bestest art you’ve seen—is frequently as fresh as the youthful eyes of its contributors.

This is a show of 86 works, some with multiple parts, but it feels like 186, so different are the disciplines and so polished the result. In that respect, it’s perhaps very much like a student art show: you can tell instantly by the presentation, the attention to detail—and often, the ideas—that everyone in it worked very hard and wanted to be here. They’re not in it for the money.
Photography student Nick Rother’s excellent Catalina Motel opens the show with a color-saturated photo of the ancient Catalina View Motel on Pacific Coast Highway—a fine place to begin. It’s so simple as to be deceptive: Rother shoots it through the former Chevrolet dealer’s lot next door, obscuring the neon-y brightness of the Catalina sign with what looks like grim industrial fencing.

Moving onward, Shawna McAllister’s Thursdays With Aunt Dawn or My Life is Like the LA River nicely derails your train of thought by being an old wooden chair with distressed paint, draped carefully with a blue-green striped shawl. Should you hate it because you hate chairs and shawls? Or like it because that was her aunt’s chair? Or is the point that years of therapy just aren’t paying off for you? Thursdays is one of the few works here that feels precious—because you know the installers (or McAllister) had to precisely arrange that shawl on that chair—and slightly amateur. But it grabs your attention.

Equally taxing, though not emotionally, is illustration graduate student Adonna Khare’s Rhinocerous, a large-scale sketch of the animal kingdom all jumbled together, like it’ll be when the ice caps melt. Here, a fox lassoes a puffer fish, and a jackrabbit sits perched in a lion’s mane as a javelina walks a tightrope overhead. Khare could someday make a lot of money; her style recalls a half-dozen children’s books about friendly animals—and by hiding her beasts in plain sight she makes you seek them out.

But this all works your brain. There’s plenty other art so elemental that there’s no getting to it, it just is. Such as Julie Williams’ Untitled, a ball gown with quilted bodice, a train and buttons up the back—all made from grocery bags. She could have had guaranteed immunity on Project Runway. Graduate sculpture student Brian Evans delivers Machine With Three Legs, a three-legged robot whose spiky legs scratch out what looks eerily like a weather system map as they twist and turn on their base. It’s riveting. Gretchen Jankowski offers up an Untitled wall hanging that looks like Sea-Monkeys box art, blending a summery textile, round wooden balls in holes, and some kind of net into an underwater scene. (Or maybe that’s the shiraz talking.)

And lastly, but equisitely, Amparo Ochoa—a graduating senior working in metals—offers up Retablitos, three tiny inch-by-two-inch metal versions of the traditional altars to saints. He switches materials, so sterling silver stands in for plaster altar walls—corrugated copper peeking through it as if the plaster’s worn away and the bricks show. Inside, angels with skull-heads sit on benches, under tiny brass crosses that are perfectly misshapen. Ochoa’s pieces could be jewelry; he’s brazed pins on their backs—and if they are, they’re the ultimate saint’s tribute.

INSIGHTS: 2007 UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM 1250 BELLFLOWER BLVD | LONG BEACH 90840 | 562.985.5761 | CSULB.EDU/ORG/UAM. OPEN TUES-SUN NOON-5 PM; THURS NOON-8 PM. FREE. OPENING RECEPTION THURS 5-7:30PM. THROUGH JUNE 3.