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Faculty art show 2022
Discover the artistic vision and creativity of our talented faculty at the Faculty Art Show 2022.
September 6-25, 2022
University of Redlands Art Gallery
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 7 from 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
The Art Department of the University of Redlands is pleased to announce a group exhibition of work by our faculty. Included in the exhibition are objects by Raúl Acero (ceramics and sculpture), photographic images by Tommi Cahill (photography), a large scale block print by Anna M. Gaitan (printmaking and graphic arts), paintings by Patrick McElnea (2022-2023 Visiting Lecturer in painting and drawing), works on paper by Penny McElroy (graphic design), and works on canvas by Jeff Wilson (digital imaging) using AI technology.
Please join us at the University Art Gallery on Colton to meet our faculty and see what directions their art has taken during the summer months!
For more information, contact Denise LaDuca Benz at denise_benz@redlands.edu by calling 909-748-8360.
Faculty artwork
Raúl Acero
This series of ceramic sculptures was inspired in part by images of Mayan and Aztec scribes. The scribe played an important role in these societies. I was impressed with the lively and engaging drawings and carvings depicting scribes with elaborate hair styles and the way they would place their stylus in their hair. Clay is an appropriate medium for these explorations since both cultures were also master ceramicists.
Tommi Cahill
Anna M. Gaitan
Patrick McElnea
My Hollywood neighborhood is haunted by projections. Palm leaves and fig trees throw their silhouettes over rows of sidewalk concrete. I see antennae-like branches reaching towards eyeballs or a subterranean colony of abdomens. These projections, like Rorschach inkblots, get recast as I paint them from photographs. They lead me to envision a shadow-world of organisms below paved land and in groomed canopies of vegetation, ecosystems marked by humans: eggs hatch in Gatorade, an insect predator mistakes microplastics for food, fluorescent gasses postpone the search for a companion. Building up and wiping down thin layers of color, I see these paintings as allegories of pleasure, foraging, and hallucination. They explore the mental images shadows can evoke and build upon my longstanding interest in “projective” vision: the process of displacing one's urges, discomforts, or desires onto what is seen. In that moment before we – as viewers – transform an “unfamiliar” image into familiarity (before seeing Jesus in a potato chip or a face on the moon's surface), our uncertainty implicates us in its formation. We become coauthors of an image unfastened to our identifiable world but grounded by shared visual encounters.
Penny McElroy
Liminal spaces and narratives reoccur in the work that I make. Uncertain gravity, flickering shadows of sound, unsettling figures bracketing paradise, something about to happen, or its surreal aftermath - these are ideas and images that contain their own logic, and puzzling out that logic captivates me. I seek to mine the unconscious, where all minds meet, and create images that express something of that very human connection. I conjure the magic of Red-Green-Blue to tell my stories. For me, the vibrating pixels of light are like fairy dust - able to transport and transform. And then the question becomes how to translate that light magic into surface magic. Some might say “Why bother? Just let them be digital images.” Yet for this old printmaker, making a physical object holds a special place in my practice heart. So this time, prints on glass. Let me know what you think.
