Don't let the name of the new Advance Painting Workshop's exhibit, The Pain & the Yearning (An Old Woman Experiences Pain and Yearning),"" fool you; there is no pretension here. The title is actually a ""Seinfeld"" reference, following the gallery's history of absurd installation titles.
The gallery is the culminating showcase for students from this semester's Advanced Painting Workshop, a unique undergraduate program structured like a graduate program. Those accepted receive workspace and more personal attention from the professors and, according to UW senior Nick Junkunc, ""It's a good situation, you don't have to worry about cleaning up and setting up your stuff ever day. Believe it or not, [cleaning] is a pretty big deterrent to actually doing things.""
In addition to the independence afforded by individual studio space, the workshop gives these students freedom to select both their medium and subject, in contrast to lower-level classes where the curriculum is more structured.
Although much of the work on display in the 7th Floor Gallery is painted canvas, other media are also used, including painted paper and resin with paper cutouts. More impressive than the diverse media, though, are the gallery's many topics.
UW senior Ellen Sieber's oil-on-canvas paintings ""Andrew's Great Catch,"" ""Christmas with the Voeglers"" and ""Archie Povell and the Onions"" all depict animals and taxidermy and focus, as Sieber puts it, on ""the kind of loving and awkward relationships that exist in between.""
Another painter, UW junior Jan Brugger, incorporates the figures from her grandmother's old photographs into her paintings, which include ""She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain,"" ""Pecker"" and ""Icing on the Cake."" She uses these images to evoke ""ideas of perfection and the standards of these times, the 1940s and '50s, and how they may or may not be relevant today.""
UW senior Laura Fischer, meanwhile, drew inspiration from observing people and noting, as she pointed out, the ""weirdness"" involved in ""regular human relationships.""
Junkunc confronts both medium and subject boundaries in his small pieces made by successively layering paper and epoxy resin to create a spatial relationship. As Junkunc put it, all of his pieces - including the simply named ""!,"" ""Two Scoops"" and ""Doggy,"" are ""linked by the fact that they are all kind of dumb, and that's kind of something I do intentionally as a subversion to pretension."" Junkunc connected his personal aversion to pretension with the exhibit's reference to ""Seinfeld.""
""That's why I always push for that kind of a title, because I think there is a lot of pretentious big-headedness in the art world. I think a lot of people stereotype it that way, maybe rightfully so. But I kind of like to subvert that idea,"" Junkunc said.
