Exhibition

School of Visual Arts presents “Nearly Distant,” an exhibition of painting, photography and installation art by current students featuring works inspired by organic forms. Curated by Richard Brooks, assistant director of SVA Galleries, “Nearly Distant” will be on view Thursday, July 17, through Saturday, August 2, at the SVA Flatiron Gallery, 133/141 West 21st Street, New York City.

MFA Fine Arts student Claire Haik’s large oil paintings on canvas are abstractions of natural imagery selected to reveal organic processes working beneath the exterior surface. Employing a subtle palette of mauves, yellows and umbers, the artist’s broad yet precise brushwork builds rich matte paint surfaces that compliment her subjects.

Drawing on childhood memories of seashore visits with her family, MFA Fine Arts student Jaewon Kim presents an elegantly simple video installation that is a quiet meditation on the ocean. By projecting wave imagery onto a reflective surface in a gallery corner, the artist illuminates the adjacent wall with a network of slowly undulating, abstract lines recalling the eternal advancing and receding of waves along the seashore.

In his photographic installation Metropolis, MPS Digital Photography student Won Kim silhouettes New York City skyscrapers against clear blue-sky backgrounds. The artist includes only the building tops in his compositions, each isolated against a large expanse of sky, in order to highlight the minimalist, iconic simplicity of the structures.  

Combining traditional craft with digital-age vocabulary, MFA Fine Arts student Dominique Palladino exhibits contemporary quilts from her series #NowTrending. Each of the artist’s brightly colored quilts contains a hash tag, taken from social media sites such as Twitter or Instagram, that is carefully integrated into her geometric compositions. In a paradoxical comment on our society, the time-consuming quilting process is used to memorialize a bit of popular culture soon to be forgotten.