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Life & Arts

Painters' influences run wild

Five UH graduate students' work on display at Blaffer

by DUSTI RHODES
The Daily Cougar

Editor's note: This is the fourth in a four-part series focusing on UH graduate students featured in the 2006 School of Art Masters Thesis Exhibition running at the Blaffer Gallery until April 29.

Using a number of surfaces and even more tactics of application, the School of Art painting graduates manage to cover more than just a canvas both in method and in subject matter.

First and foremost

Pairing actual objects and images from her past, Rabe'a Ballin turns her personal history into a body of work that allows her audience to see where she is coming from.

"Most of my work … has to do with influences ? music, culture, growing up in the South ? and reminiscing about those things," Ballin said.

Her work at the Blaffer is a collection of objects from her first experiences with those we can all relate to ? like her first movie stub, her first cassette tape and first day of school ? to those that represent times that are more exclusive ? like her first family death, first pregnancy test and first love letter. Alongside these are portraits that represent her parents. A woman with curlers is her mother, a hairdresser and the back of a combat helmet is her father, a soldier. The audiences is never allowed to see their faces and so must acquaint themselves with who her parents were in terms of careers.

Think of the children

A little girl sucks her thumb with a balloon in hand as her mother's figure looms over her, protecting her but not really acknowledging her. She is fierce and her full sleeve of tattoos adds to her menacing appearance, but the little girl's tattoo is covered, which seems to emphasize her innocence. It's images like this one that make up Eric Michael Jones' work that have his audience reexamining not only how we view children, but how we raise them, as well.

"I like to give (the children) expressions or body language that you wouldn't expect to see," Jones said.

His work has moved him from painting to a more digital medium, as his images are often a collage of cutouts and his own drawings.

His images are reflections on childrens' development in our society as he comments on what may be to come if we don't rethink some of the ways we raise them. The mother in the aforementioned picture may seem like a threat to both the viewer and the child, but, as of now, she is all that little girl has.

"You know, who is going to raise her if you're not?" Jones said.

Out of control

Letting her paint make most of the decisions for her, Kristin Flanagan relies on the elements to bring her work full circle.

"It's a really uncontrollable process," Flanagan said. "I never know what the thing is going to look like until I come back the next day."

Her method consists of pouring paint on to a surface and letting elements such as gravity, wind and tilt develop the work. Then after the paint dries, Flanagan adds her own touches to help the image take shape ? but what shape? Flanagan said people have told her they have seen everything from astrology to tsetse flies to brain tumors in her work.

What stands out to Flanagan is not what the image is, but how it relates to what brought it about.

"The same forces that sort of form the things ? that these seem to depict ? astronomy, cellular images ? also form these pictures," Flanagan said. "But they're not that intentional ? I can't replicate any of this."

Inside out

Using the inner workings of the human body, Janice Weeks utilizes body systems such as the respiratory, blood and nerve systems' relationship to show how artists deliver their ideas to the audience.

"I think that life, just like the art process, is an energy exchange," Weeks said. "You take experience, and then that manifests into art, and then that is exchanged and shared with the audience."

Weeks said she has always had an appeal to didactic and historic aspects of the human form and developed a natural talent for drawing it. Recently, however, she has accepted the use of more pop culture items like the crystals she uses in much of her work now. 

"I was really interested in how these girls were covering their cell phones and exalting something that was already a status symbol," Weeks said. "I thought why not use that to pay attention to … what is going on inside of us and not as much what's going on, on the outside of us."

Redrawing history

A stack of books in a small room makes up a part of Douglas Cason's body of work at the Blaffer. His work could fool many into thinking they had just entered a museum full of old books and artifacts, but a closer work may draw concern as to who tampered with these displays.

Cason said he is drawn to the importance that books once had, but in today's society, seems to be dwindling. His methods destroy everything the books once were, down to the binding, in order for him to project his own representation into them.

In the end, Cason's work changes the entire meaning of the book or of the events that it was depicting and, as a result, viewers are now experiencing Cason's version of history.

"I'm giving them what I want them to see," Cason said.

Send comments to dcshobiz@mail.uh.edu