While “Artist Statement,” the exhibition currently on display at the Great Park Gallery through November 10, empowers graduate art students to display their evolving expertise in painting, photography, video, installations and other media, its predominant feature is their understanding of the range, depth, conceptual aspects and significance of experimentation in art-making today.

Sydney Walters’ (Claremont Graduate School) “Crumpled Wall” (2018), as an example, is a large acrylic painting of floral patterns, appropriated from the background of a 1427 Giovanni di Paolo devotional painting, “Branchini Madonna,” in the Norton Simon Museum.

While the floral designs may not be immediately apparent as religious iconography, the patterned images, set against a deep yellow background (representing gold leaf), possess elegance, grace and beauty. Then, rather than hang the completed canvas against a wall, the artist draped it loosely from two pins, affording the painting a crumpled look, and imparting three dimensionality or a slightly sculptural look to it. On a conceptual level, this work explores how devotion relates to women, Walters explains.

Chloe Jeongmyo Kim (Courtesy of the artist)

“China Factory” (2019) by Chloe Joeongmyo Kim (Otis College of Art and Design) is comprised of several large sculptural pieces created on Plexiglas sheets and adorned with brightly colored paint and digital images. The artist describes this series as a response to her sensory experiences of industrial and humanistic patterns that she perceived while visiting manufacturing plants in China. Yet each individual work appears more like an abstract painting, albeit with bold hard-edge aspects.

And as Kim’s individual sculptures are created on transparent Plexiglas, and lit to display their painted and digital patterns, they assume the appearance of contemporary stained glass. The artist explains that the penetrating light flowing through her pieces helps create phenomenological effects within them. 

Ivy Guild’s (UC Irvine) two-piece “Docile Bodies” (2018), of two muscular male torsos, challenges what the artist refers to as “the cold, inhuman hardness traditionally associated with sculptures of the muscular male form.” By creating her torsos from the traditional female materials of cotton, batting and thread, dyed in pale pinks and blues, the completed pieces take on decidedly feminine aspects. 

Observe these works more closely and the viewer will see fuzzy, pixelated landscapes, imprinted in checkerboard fashion onto the cotton material. The total look is that of sculptural pieces, combining masculine forms with traditional feminine fabrics and sewing techniques. These “docile” sculptures further suggest that the artist is exploring established male and female roles, which are today increasingly questioned and even muddled.

One of the more surprising artworks in this exhibition is Justin Rightsell’s (Cal State University, Long Beach) “Untitled (what lies outside, beneath the horizon; violence; gesture; thaumoto)” (2018), three part chromogenic print. This long narrow photograph, taking up much of a side gallery wall, is a stunning example of cameraless photography. That is, a photo created only with photographic paper, natural and artificial light, images and chemicals, and without a camera. 

This striking abstract image, with its vague landscape features, in black, deep blues and white, further manifests the role of chance, or the artist’s penchant to let natural elements (the light) and human-made components (the photographic paper and the chemicals) control the finished piece. Rightsell explains that his disregard for traditional photographic practices is replaced by a curiosity driven by his metaphysical and existential obsessions.

Reed van Brunschot (Courtesy of the artist)

Relevant to today’s consumer-driven world are two enormous, floor-to-ceiling plastic “Thank You Bags” (2018) — the type of shopping bags that are filled with canned and bottled goods from the 99 Cents Only Store. These handmade sculptural works illuminate what USC graduate student Reed van Brunschot’s wall didactics describes as, “the overuse of plastic and its environmental impact, as well as the dualities we face in capitalism.” The labels go on to explain, “The desirable lure to constantly buy more, the ever positive ‘Thank you’ and ‘Thank You for Shopping With us!’ becomes subliminal, encouraging a consumption-based cycle.”

Michele K. Sauer’s (California Institute of the Arts) large, darkly colored acrylic paintings “Kitchen Wake” and “Floodlight” (both 2019) possess modern art figurative aspects, and are perhaps influenced by the populist style of French painter Fernand Léger (1881-1995). Sauer’s “Kitchen Wake” depicts two bold androgynous figures, inhabiting the far left side of the painting, while preparing meals with determination. The bulk of the painting, illustrating an askew, illusionistic kitchen with sink and range, helps create an artistic environment that, Sauer explains, travels between past and future. 

The artist’s “Floodlight” is more obscure and identifiable primarily by its title. Two human figures, who appear to be staring at each other, seem to have had their personal space interfered by a random floodlight.

Zi Zhuang (Courtesy of the artist)

The dramatic wall-sized “Hold On” (2019) of Velcro and yarn by Zi Zhuang (Claremont Graduate School) depicts “the imagery of magnetic fields to create metaphors for relationships between humans, animals, objects and substances,” according to the exhibition’s wall didactics. Yet this abstract piece, in bright reds, black and white, with fragments of yarn woven throughout, and even holding it up, appears to be influenced by abstract expressionism with its gestural brush-strokes, spontaneity and biomorphic shapes.

Rounding out this dramatic, groundbreaking exhibition is an eight-minute video, “Erasure” (2018) by Stephanie Mei Huang (California Institute of the Arts). The video, presumably shot by the artist and starring only herself, is set in a Southern California field with mountains in the distance. Set in the field are a chair, an old TV, a lamp and an easel, the latter displaying a canvas that the artist is painting on. Throughout the short video, she replicates on the canvas the various objects in the field, as well as the larger landscape, seeking to have the objects blend in with the background and perhaps disappear. 

Mei Huang’s artists statement, appropriately descriptive to the video, reads: “Through personal experiences of diaspora, her work is rooted in the nuances of fragmented upbringing in terms of physical location and culture and how these forces affect changing perceptions of home, nationhood, loss and identity.”

“Artist Statement” is on view through November 10, 2019. Great Park Gallery, Palm Court Art Complex, Orange County Great Park, Irvine; Thu. & Fri., noon – 4 p.m., Sat. & Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; free. cityofirvine.org/orange-county-great-park/arts-exhibitions.

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