School of Visual Arts presents “Trace,” an exhibition of installation, sculpture and video art by current students and recent alumni. Curated by Richard Brooks, assistant director of SVA Galleries, the exhibition will be on view July 10 through August 3 at the Visual Arts Gallery, 601 West 26st Street, 15th floor, New York City.

Employing a geometric vocabulary of basic rectangles and triangles, Byul Han (an MFA Fine Arts student) makes deceptively simple objects that hover between painting and sculpture. Composed of wood and cement, with a subdued palette, the artist’s seemingly casual construction belies a thoughtful, balanced approach to composition.

In the video Sweet Nothings, JuJu Rhee (MFA 2013 Photography, Video and Related Media) examines her mixed feelings about the tender affections and compliments lovers give to one another. Using dramatic light, the work documents the artist’s performance of blindfolding herself, then crawling on the floor searching for chocolates covered in syrup, which she eats off the floor. The ritual concludes with Rhee standing, removing the blindfold and reciting a “sweet nothing” to herself.

Yue Lin (an MFA Fine Arts student) presents the equivalent of a 21st century mandala with her color projection on a wooden panel. Drawing on a variety of sources for inspiration, including Asian landscape architecture and philosophy, the artist’s bell-shaped abstraction features vivid pop art color and a small, rectangular “key hole” at the bottom, as if inviting the viewer to enter another realm.

Alessia Resta (BFA 2013 Fine Arts) explores organic form in two carved wood sculptures. The artist deftly incorporates the plywood grain and its natural color into her works, which appear to be abstractions but actually represent an open seashell and a starfish in the process of regeneration.

Working in the tradition of Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, Jamie Rubin (BFA 2013 Fine Arts) creates visceral, biomorphic sculptures composed of glass, plaster, sugar and soil. Her raw, fleshy surfaces allude to what the artist describes as “the rare state of an individual fully exposed.” Referencing the human figure as well as food, Rubin's invented bodies toy with a marriage of the familiar and the foreign.

In her large installation, Minseop Yoon (MFA 2013 Fine Arts) extends drawing into three dimensions. The artist suspends thin black plastic rods that serve as lines in a sketch to delineate interior spaces such as windows and doors, while numerous fragments of these rods litter the floor, like residue in an erased charcoal drawing. By reducing her minimalist work to the most essential lines and planes, Yoon explores the mystery in domestic interiors devoid of human presence.

In her experimental video Keep Breathing, Zyia Zhongyuan Zhang (MFA 2013 Computer Art) creates a meditation on the passage of time. Using both stop-motion and time-lapse techniques, her work shifts back and forth between elemental, hand drawn images of horizontal lines and spirals to clips of light creating shadows on floors, windows and buildings. By contrasting the real and the man-made in this manner, the artist invites multiple interpretations and associations.

Exhibition

Trace

SVA Chelsea Gallery

Reception