Graduates 2017
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Rose Briccetti
My varied artistic practice examines feminine and personal identity through themes of fertility, labor, and nature. Using a multi-media approach grounded in an interest in beauty, I examine my womanhood through the lens of Natural History. My interests in taxonomy, collecting, curation, and display are rooted in my past as an exhibition designer and teen-girl collage maker and crafter. Governed by my sense of humor and love of the absurd, I explore the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity, and truth and fiction.
Marcos Christodoulou
My work comments on contemporary politics and culture, and tries to make sense of its contradictions.
An example: At the general time of this writing, a candidate for the U.S. presidency anchors his platform on the simple assertion that we are in a dire state of crisis; dangerous criminals are pouring through our borders, threatening our safety, purity, prosperity, our existence as we know it. The public (descendants of immigrants, newly minted citizens even) respond by propelling him to the status of frontrunner.
Yumiko Glover
My artwork draws inspiration from my real-life experiences while growing up in Hiroshima, Japan, as well as the observation of its society and culture as an artist living in the United States. In my depiction of youthful figures juxtaposed with elements associated with historical and societal underpinnings, I present the irony between war romanticized versus actualized while simultaneously elucidating the inter-generational ideological gaps in today’s Japan.
yumikohglover@gmail.com
www.yumikoglover.com
Sunny Samuel
Looking through microscopes and telescopes, we gaze into spaces unseen by the naked eye. Inside, between, and around those spaces are strange reverberations with exponentially scaling consequences. I paint this activity into grids, passages, and fields. Patterns and layers emerge that invoke organization, data sets, and symmetry. As these layers develop, I obliterate and rebuild forms. Apoptotic cycles.
s_a_s@umail.ucsb.edu
www.sunnysamuel.com
Peter Sowinski
My sculpture and installation pieces revolve around dual fascinations: the use of technology and a deep interest in material and techniques of craft. By technology, I mean everything from simple mechanical contraptions to modern computerized apparatus. I seek to create pieces that merge the simple beauty of a well-made object with technical sophistication, imbuing the objects with their own agency. These charged pieces engage complex ideas, from questioning the role of machines in our lives to pondering the seemingly universal force of entropy.
petersowinski@gmail.com
petersowinski.com
Scott Slade Wagner
My role as an artist is much like that of a trickster facilitator. I invite people to enter and become part of an altered dimension of daily reality so that they might sensually consider and experience the presence of ideas in a form they are an integral member of. Through this, these works aim to create a public dialogue that traverses the art space to those of the wider social fabric. These interactive aesthetic experiences then promote a social practice of participatory, shared, cultural development.
Fascinated by the function-like relationship of environmental influence on humans (and other life forms) and humans’ input on their environments, I research an array of subjects and further use my imagination to consider the dynamics of this relationship on many levels, from a theoretical prehistoric time to a post-historic one.
www.scottywagner.info
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