Student Select

Last month I caught a student show just before it closed at the McLean Project for the Arts featuring selected works by students from Virginia Community College (the Alexandria Campus of Northern Virginia) and George Mason University who had studied under Rebecca Kamen, who had a solo show herself in an adjacent space. (The NVCC student contributions can be seen here.) The student show seemed forced; a common association with one person (even a teacher) didn't strike me as a very good reason to bring works together that represented varying levels of artistic scope and confidence. If that sounds like I'm tiptoeing around calling some of the work bad, well, there is that. But all the works could have been better served by a show or several shows that paid some mind to the works in question.

Nevertheless, I want to post notes about three artists who caught my eye:

• Lisa McCarty, Passages From: And If We Would All Live Out Loud—At first glance I thought the work was pure saccharine: collages of scanned images of various scrawled notes and bits of text, which lead the viewer to recall the various paeans and poetry collected over the ages on his desk in biology, second period. What brought me back to the work was the orientation of the notes on the panels taken as a whole, over which they seemed scattered with a perceptible order. From the meager poetic selections of the text a significant and, I think, boastful line demands attention: "small areas turn into all over." Apparently so. McCarty has a mixed media work in "Strictly Painting 5" featuring collaged prints applied to canvas with paint; I didn't find it that fetching. (The prints in that piece appeared to be photos of rock musicians, a bolder flirtation with Avril Lavigne–esque cliché than she risked with the text for Passages From.) For me, the jury's still out. No doubt, being selected for such a significant show is a real coup, so I imagine I'll have more cause to see her work in the future.

• Valerie Soles, Twice Removed—Well executed and notable for their subtlety, Soles's six photographs were arranged in pairs: each of the three larger prints were hung over a smaller Polaroid picture. The Polaroids revealed a greater detail of or perspective on its corresponding larger print. The three pairs of photographs follow a woman navigating a woodsy clearing. It isn't clear whether the woman is playing or working when she's climbing trees or manipulating a structured pile of twigs and branches (which, in turn, brings to mind the totemic sculpture of Andy Goldsworthy). Certain signifiers emerge in the photo—the woman wears hip sneakers, a wedding ring—that the detail of the woman's face in one of the Polaroids does not edify. The works reveal indeterminacy, potential, and calm.

• Abraham Waksman, David's Harp—I wanted to see more of Waksman's works after seeing this image in particular. Waksman uses digital enhancement to create forms with nonspecific but placeable references in nature. "David's Harp" looks like the cross-section of a chambered nautilus or cochlea refitted into the shape of a harp; geometric regularity and proportion serving as the formal intersection between these things. What made the works curious and not just clever were the way that the digital manipulations underperformed around the edges—pixellated seams that indicate the author's hand and emphasize that the new structure is still a composite of the common features of other distinct forms.

CORRECTION: "The student show at McLean was actually a joint venture by Rebecca Kamen and Peggy Feerick. All the students from George Mason Studied under Feerick, including McCarty and Soles. Feericks work was also featured in a separate gallery from Kamen's." Thanks for the note goes to Juliane, who, apparently, was the model in Soles's works.