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By Serene Al-Kawas

This past Saturday members of all strata of the Atlanta art community congregated at Atlantic Station to view and celebrate a collection of work by Savannah College of Art and Design students, alumni and faculty. Over 100 artists were featured in the exhibit, presented in conjunction with Atlanta Celebrates Photography, and their work filled the sizable converted space, creating thematic spaces within the larger gallery setting. Though all the artists were in some way related to SCAD, the pieces varied from traditional framed prints, to Van Dyke Brown quilts, to installation dollhouses with photographs as windows. Despite its size the gallery was constantly brimming with viewers anxious to experience the show in its entirety. Although many in the art world are tempted to dismiss student shows as amateur, this one night exhibit proved that professionalism and creativity is alive and well in today’s artistic youth.

Though the show featured faculty and alumni work, the organizing committee consisted entirely of students led by faculty adviser Judith Pishnery. The jury for the show was comprised of various graduate and undergraduate students who worked to put together the exhibition, gather work and curate the show from start to finish. The exhibition was also a competition with awards going to Eric Mason, Taylor Lupton, Maria Joyner, and a people’s choice to Stephanie Pharr.

Though much of the work was intriguing, there were a few artists that stood out. Eric Mason won First Prize with his life-size images of phone booths mounted on enormous wooden frames, and then covered in epoxy resin. The images were shot with a wide-angle lens, depicting the phone booths as stable as our world warps and changes around them. The work speaks to a greater socio-political standstill in contemporary society, clearly pointing out our general American need to speed forward with technology and desires for our own lives, leaving behind us those who cannot afford to keep up. Phone booths that still exist seem to function to the middle class as relics of a forgotten but recent past, whereas to those who are without cell phones, they stand as reminders of their unimportant and under-considered existence. I found these pieces to be not only beautiful, but highly relevant in this, a time when greed has brought our economy crashing down around us.

Another artist who caught my eye did not win any prizes or recognition, but the quiet irony of her work has stayed in my mind since viewing it. Gabrielle Sirkin, a SCAD undergraduate student, had two framed color photographs hanging on the gallery wall, and within each one was a sketch-like face. At first I thought I was drawn to in the images because of their formal compositions and qualities, such as the repetition of shapes in each image. After looking at them longer and contemplating their meaning, I was suddenly struck by what I truly loved about them. The banality of the moments that were captured almost escaped me as simply mundane, until I gave further thought to the intricacies of those moments. One image featured a biker riding past the face made of leaves on asphalt. The utter absurdity of this is almost silenced by the truly “boring” look of the pieces. Since seeing them, I have also really come to appreciate them as performance “left-overs,” a mere glimpse at what must have been a well thought out plan to make faces in boring places.

The SCAD Juried Photography exhibit was impressive in the caliber of artwork, artist and exhibit, and certainly these names are some that we will see again in the future.

Serene Al-Kawas is a student at SCAD in Atlanta. Steve Aishman teaches photography at SCAD.

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