After months of taking snapshots of random people, toiling away in the UH photo lab and honing their concepts of creativity, a group of senior photography students will finally get the chance to reveal their vision of what art is.
Dissonance: The University of Houston Photo/Digital Senior Exhibition will allow patrons to explore various themes, concepts and media from 17 different student perspectives.
If you’re interested to see what some UH art majors spend hours on end doing, the exhibition will open in conjunction with San Sebastiana: An Installation by Delilah Montoya and a leg of Fotofest, an internationally-known photography festival, at 6 p.m. Thursday at Space125Gallery, 3201 Allen Parkway.
The Houston Art Alliance has intertwined the exhibitions of both Associate Professor Delilah Montoya and her senior photography class as part of its mission to encourage collaborative art among teachers and students.
The event will mark a stopping point for all of the time and effort which went into the pieces, the installation and the collaborative process – all of which Montoya is sure the exhibition will convey.
"The students have been working together for the last couple of years, so they know each other well. They’re more of a community," Montoya said. "I’m really pleased at how well they blossomed."
As the senior photography students have different ideas of the kind of art they want to make, Dissonance will capture an array of techniques and conceptual thought.
Alex Nguyen, who will show three pieces as one installation at the exhibition, said although he draws inspiration from his Vietnamese-American heritage, his artwork is not confined to it.
"A lot of people are doing personal, diary entry kind of art, drawing from their darkest fears or turmoil with their family and people are drawn to that kind of art," Nguyen said. "There’s another group of people in the class that want to explore concepts in general and ask questions about who they are and what art is. I try to push that medium."
For Jacqueline Jocson, who is also a photographer for The Daily Cougar, nature and personal events are the sources from which she draws to create her highly imaginative works.
"My work is about the allegorical translation of my life. I take people, places and events from my life and translate them into this other world, a world that’s full of symbolism," Jocson said.
Focusing a great deal on different textures, Jocson takes pictures of trees, birds and other animals and combines them to create composite landscapes and creatures.
"I pretty much cut and paste in Photoshop, cut things out and paste them onto a blank canvas. Then I blend them together and paint over them to create one seamless image," Jocson said. "It’s a composite scene, but I want the viewer’s belief to be suspended."
Other artists will use more unconventional means of expression, while experimenting with different forms of media.
Jenny Westbury transcends into the realm of visual art and uses elements of sound, sculpture, performance and video to delve into and uncover traces of her childhood, while Diego Almazan uses concepts of mortality and deterioration stemming from his youngest brother’s compromised physical and mental condition to ground his work.
"I attempt to represent visually how a life might fade into extinction and how fragile existence really is," Almazan said.
The exhibition, serving as a culmination of work with photo/digital professors Suzanne Bloom, Mary Magsamen, Montoya and the diverse senior class, will run through April 17.
For more information and a complete list of participating artists, visit www.dissonanceuh.com.
