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Life & Arts

Art Masters Thesis Exhibition opens Saturday on campus

by DUSTI RHODES
The Daily Cougar

Editors note: This is the first in a four-part series focusing on UH graduate students featured in the 2006 Art Masters Thesis Exhibition running at the Blaffer Gallery from Saturday through April 29.

As the semester comes to a close, senioritis is in the air, and for many graduating students the time to say goodbye to finals, term papers and waking up early can't come soon enough. For others, however, these final few weeks will require all their creative energy as they bring all the lessons learned to a close and put them on display.

The Blaffer Gallery will lend its walls to the School of Art's graduate candidates for the 2006 Art Masters Thesis Exhibition opening Saturday and running through April 29. The show will feature the work of the 12 artists working with graphic design, painting, photography and sculpture.

This exhibition is a chance for the students to show their work in an established gallery and a chance for the Houston community to see a collection of every student's work. The students were also responsible for booking their own solo exhibition at a Houston gallery this past semester. The Thesis Exhibition, however, is more widely known in the art community and helps attract a wider range of art enthusiasts to view the students' work.

In photography, attendees will explore the beauty of worlds colliding in windows and discover the aesthetics of prosthetics.

Looking through the glass

A construction site creeps into an area rug store through a reflection that juxtaposes the two scenes creating confusion for the viewer who must decide whether they are in looking in or out.

"A lot of times (the picture) is sort of an interplay between the foreground and the background, trying to decide which is which," graduate candidate photographer Austin Miller said about his knack for bringing the outside in and inside out with his exotic reflections from the streets of Seoul, Tokyo and Mexico City.

Miller said that his need for certain complex spatial dilemmas is what had him traveling across oceans for inspiration.

Miller said his ventures in American cities like Las Vegas often turned up unsuccessful. However, the anxiety of never knowing what will develop is one of the aspects that keeps Miller interested in his work.

"Especially if you're using a film camera, there's always like a little surprise if things actually turn out and with reflections probably even more so," Miller said. "I think about doing something like still life or landscapes -- it can get real boring at times because you know exactly what you are going to get beforehand. I really like that element of surprise."

Miller is also working on a series called Postcards created from a collection started by his uncle.

"For some reason he had all these postcards from China and Russia that sort of captured my fascination," Miller said.

Each postcard is scanned into the computer, and from there Miller creates drawings on top of them, continuing his trend to confuse his viewer with fascinating creations that require one to decide what is and isn't Miller's.

Miller said he plans to continue teaching at UH through the summer and after that would like to teach at high school or community college. Ideally, he hopes to get a Fulbright Scholarship to fund a trip to Korea so he can continue his work.

It's OK to stare

A common theme seen in many artists' work is the ability to make the unpleasant attractive. Artists have an eye that searches out the overlooked and brings them into a perspective that most would have never discovered.

Graduate candidate Rose Cosme takes this idea a step further as she gives her viewers no choice but to go against their better judgment.

Cosme's photos feature prosthetic limbs, mannequins and even a birthing dummy as the subjects, allowing audiences to turn against their manners. 

"(Prosthetics) are something that people normally don't look at because we're taught, ‘Don't stare at people that have disabilities,'" Cosme said. "

Cosme's lighting creates intensely eerie environments that cause each image to haunt the viewer. The result is either a newfound appreciation or discomfort, but either way they will stick in the beholder's eye.

Cosme said that the urge to work with the pieces is to bring a person together -- something she admits she has had trouble doing.

"I think of the prosthetic as an object that makes someone whole and for me, I think I've always felt incomplete," Cosme said.

She said her feelings stem from childhood memories of being teased for being more dark-skinned then her other Hispanic classmates.

Cosme said she credits her preference for photography to the scene behind the lens.

"There is just something about looking at the world through a viewfinder," Cosme said.

After graduation, Cosme intends to continue to work with her prosthetic pieces (most of which she gets from eBay) and also plans to focus more attention on a business she runs with her sister selling her commercial photographs and vintage handbags.

Send comments to dcshobiz@mail.uh.edu