Carnaval Blues: Imprensa 2006

Columbia Online

Summers, Silveira honored with Weisman awards

Jill Dorothy Summers (MFA ‘05, Book and Paper) and Miguel B. M. Silveira (BA ’05, Film and Video) won top honors for their works at the opening of the 2005 Albert P. Weisman Scholars Exhibition at the Hokin Gallery Thursday evening.

Summers’s project, Cohabitation, is a collection of five short stories that take place through the course of one day involving the inhabitants of a single building. The work is currently featured on NPR’s Third Coast Audio Festival.

Silveira’s film, Carnaval Blues, is a poignant, visually sophisticated story of a student who travels to Rio to observe the city’s culture of violence. The backdrop for a narrative about the companionship he finds with a man and his daughter is the mounting tension of the city’s preparation for Carnaval.

The exhibition, which includes works by the 45 recipients of 2005 Weisman scholarships, runs through February 24 at the Hokin Gallery and Annex, 623 S. Wabash Ave.

http://web3.colum.edu/newsletter/archives/001403.html

Columbia College Chicago

Albert P. Weisman memorial exhibition

BY DANE DEASY, ART + PHOTO EDITOR

Jan. 23 - Feb. 24, 2006
The Weisman Scholarship Fund began in 1974 in order to give students an opportunity to create a unique statement within the context of a completed body of work. In this year’s Weisman Exhibition many themes and ideas are present, including family relationships, racial considerations, surveillance, city spaces, gender issues, memory, and many others. The Columbia College undergraduates and graduates that have participated in this year’s show have shown their creativity in a wide variety of media and forms, including but not limited to photography, book and paper arts, and film.

Photographic work overwhelms a majority of the gallery space. The photography present is very diverse and impressive. A majority of this work throughout the gallery expresses various ideas relating to social concerns in today’s world. Some of the topics explored: sorority life, consumerism in the workplace, suburban growth, Chicago communities and visual exploration, color and form, gun culture, portraiture and Vietnamese diasporas. The variety is eye-opening. The photographs in the show are very strong, but there are a few bodies of work that particularly stand out. Brian Sorg’s graphic examination of industrial architecture is very minimalist and captivating because of his clever use of repetition in the layout of his work. Brandon Sorg’s nighttime exploration of highway underpasses is both eerie and rich in detail and sense of space. Building up some courage, Gregory Stimac places us in the line of fire at shooting ranges, where he lets the viewer stare back at the men behind the guns. Kelly Stryker handles the observation of economic gaps across the spectrum of industrial and residential development in Chicago very perceptively in her series, “Across the Way.” The two hanging scrolls by Howard Henry Chen, examining the current blending and blossoming of modern day, post-war Vietnamese culture, are both elegant and sophisticated.

"Carnaval Blues" by Miguel Silveira won best undergraduate piece. His short film about a student traveling to Brazil is highly polished. In the clip viewable in the gallery, a Brazilian woman tells the story of "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes." With beautiful cinematography - including sweeping camera crane movements - and professional acting, Silveira's work is a sign of wonderful things to come. The winning graduate piece is a strange mix of fantasy and fiction presented through a broad range of media. Jill Summers' "Cohabition" is made from text, audio, music, and a surrealistic doll house. Her project is an expansive examination of relationships existing in the world.

The 2006 Weisman show should be considered a success. Though it is broad ranging with no focal subject matter, the work is effective at representing the quality of art the upper echelon of students at Columbia College are capable of producing. If anyone missed this year's exhibition, it would be considered wise to put attending next year's show high on the list of things to do.

http://www.colum.edu/students/reservoir/artandphoto/february2006/27-05/weismanreview0206.htm

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