Living & Arts

Senior Art Show impresses at List Gallery

In print | April 17, 2008

In the List Gallery, one can take a meandering journey through the forests of Connecticut and then meet “queer superhero” St. Sebastian. Last week, he works of Meredith Leich ’08 and Sebastian Duncan-Portuondo ’08 were on display until this Wednesday as part of the Senior Art Show exhibit at the List Gallery.

Leich’s muted watercolor scenes and Duncan-Portuondo’s bold colors and selection of innovative mediums depicted two very interesting and very different styles. “Though our work is very different, we shared an interest in narrative and the figure and its interactions with nature — and I think the differences played of each other well,” Leich said.

Watercolor pieces that explored outdoor scenes and the subtle expressions of faces made up Leich’s portion of the exhibit. “Watercolor possesses a loyalty to the human touch… This obvious evidence of humanity calls me ceaselessly to the medium,” Leich said. Indeed, each of her paintings effectively utilizes this form, from capturing the soft shadows on a human face to tracing the intricate web of branches on a tree.

As Leich concentrated on this one medium, she returned again and again to scenes and themes that interested her, most notably in her series of paintings of the water tower. “I love the lone elegant shape of the water tower, its slender neck widening improbably into its bulging head,” Leich said. Each painting is a unique view of this familiar scene — reflecting different seasons, weather patterns, and the artist’s differing emotions.

Another landscape that inspired Leich was a Connecticut forest scene. Four views of this scene are depicted in the four panels of a folding screen. “My folding screen represents my most heartfelt effort,” Leich said, adding “Since the beginning of last year, I’ve wanted to build a screen, based off of the Japanese landscape screens, which would depict the field in front of my grandparents’ house in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut.” This landscape creates an open view of the scene that invites the viewer to experience the serenity of the forest.

Duncan-Portuondo’s work also effectively invites the viewer to experience the artist’s vision, but in a very different way. While Leich maintains a relationship with one medium, Sebastian uses everything from mosaic to collage to graphic novel style paintings to achieve his effect. Where Leich uses soft, melding colors, Sebastian prefers stark contrasts and vibrant colors. But despite his choice to utilize a variety of mediums in his work, all of Sebastian’s work is nevertheless unified because it is all “charged with the tensions and intersections between ideas of the private and public,” Duncan-Portuondo said.

According to Duncan-Portuondo, his art “both embraces [his] experience of the world and imagines situations of liberation and critiques of reality.”

For Duncan-Portuondo, this includes creating an alternative superhero. “Since the Nineteenth Century, St. Sebastian has been adopted as an icon-idol by sexual and gender deviant communities,” Duncan-Portuondo said. In this series, he “re-envision[ed] Sebastian’s legend as the birthing of a queer superhero.” Through his choice of contrasting red, black, and white colors and cartoon-like images, Duncan-Portuondo effectively captures the graphic novel style, but his decision to render it though a series of oil paintings interestingly depicts the graphic novel as a form of “high art.”

Through a pair of doors that the audience is invited to open, one can see the mosaic scene that forms another of Duncan-Portuondos works. Again using the colors red and black, he depicts a type of forest scene that invites the viewer in a unique way. “Ultimately, the viewer must complete the work, for only upon opening the doors is the image revealed and only upon the experience of viewing does the true (and always changing) meaning of the piece become formulated,” Duncan-Portuondo said. He further facilitates viewer interaction in another art piece by inviting them to rummage through the drawers of a dresser.

From forest scenes to graphic novels, this exhibit presents two very different styles of creating art. But both artists effectively invite the viewer to share in their art, through viewing the pieces and through reading the artists’ own interpretations and descriptions of their creations.