I think that anyone interested in collecting art, or simply following art, ought to make a point of paying attention to artists at the beginning of their careers. By the time artists reach mid-career or achieve success, conversation about them is complicated and muddied by the politics and agendas of art world discourse in general. There’s no enthusiasm like the kind prompted by encounter with the new, unburdened by the weight of worldly opinion and expectation, and no better investment that that of attention to the development of an artist’s work.
The SAIC Galleries is now showing New Work 2025, featuring ten students at the School of the Art Institute, five undergraduates and five postgraduates, selected by a faculty jury.
I liked the group of photographs by Berkley Reddick titled: The Distance Between Our Shadows, executed with the antique process known as mordançage, where bleaching chemicals are used to bring about partial detachment of the photographic emulsion layer from the paper.
As always, I’m drawn to works that reveal new stories at different scales.
A 3D work combining sculptured wood and pigment on paper by Fia Kim, A Value of Convergence That Exists Nowhere in the World —
A photograph to capture a poetic conception, by Cenìnye Harris —
Art as interrupted ceremony, The Miracles, a grouping of sculptures by Jonathan Melo. Experiments with the red dye extracted from cochineal beetles (which used to be used to color Campari liquor). In white primer it produced a lavender shade, rubbing on wood created a desert sandstone look, and mixed with sand a coppery color. A single material ingredient that moves through other materials in the work; consistent yet always transforming and being transformed.
I don’t know why schools like SAIC don’t do more to make it easier to find out about their student artists and the work they do — there are no URLs or social media links for the artists in the program or the exhibition web page that an interested attendee might access. Anyway, below are Instagram handles for all the artists in the show. If some of them intrigue you, start following their stories as they write them.
Cenìnye Harris @ceninye
Benjamin Holmes @benholmes___
Xingyu Huang @xingyu_xyh
At Huth @at.huth
Hyeyoon Jung @hyeyoonlillyjung
Monet-Chanel Khanyahl @Monet-Chanel Khanyahl
Fia Kim @chaeindel
Jonathan Melo @jmeloo.o
Berkley Reddick @berkleyreddick
Johanna Rae Wyss @battycakes