The "Yet Another Reality" portrait exhibition is currently on display in the Fine Arts Building from now until April 8. The gallery features work from eight contemporary artists, who paint and draw heads. According to its press release, " ... this 'heady' exhibit isn't simply that all the artists make portraits. Rather, the connection rests in the artists' common interest in demonstrating the implied authority of the photographic portrait. They also reveal the genre's shortcomings." Upon entering the gallery, British artist Julian Opie's vinyl paintings are one of the first sights in the gallery, occupying the right wall. Opie uses a colorful and simplified style based on real individuals.
Across from Opie's paintings, Japanese artist Kumi Yamashita has several conte crayon portraits made from deliberately rubbing the subject's credit card numbers over and over to create a realistic and individualized face.
"Yamashita makes a sharp comment on our impersonal and commercial time," the artist bio information that accompanied her work stated. "I like the credit card (portraits) the best," Karen Marino, a 6th-semester communications design major said. "They're all amazing though."
Austrian artist Gottfriend Helnwein's large mixed media portrait of a little girl faces the gallery's entrance. The press release states, "[Helnwein's] images intend to evoke associations with mutilation, anguish or internal alienation ... his paintings blatantly put forward images that border the line of social unacceptability and comment on the results of post Second World War society."
Russian artist Boris Zaborov had a couple old fashioned-looking acrylic and pencil portraits, noted by the posted artist's information as having a nostalgic mood. Lordan Bunch had some oil paintings exhibited that were based on photo-booth photographs from the 1920s and 1940s. Since the paintings were created from photographs rather than sitters, the facial expressions in a couple of them appeared more fleeting and animated. "By painting these portraits, Bunch is immortalizing lives depicted in small inconsequential photographs...illustrating their stories, contrived or not," artist's posted background information stated. "I like the photo-booth [paintings] ... they were beautiful and realistic," Alexandra van den Berg, a 4th-semester art history major said.
"I usually choose the image which is the most revealing: it is often also the image which renders the subject most vulnerable, both psychologically and physically," she said in her statement. Lastly, Chinese artist Yi Chen had some of his "Generation E Series" portraits, which were interesting and meaningful collages created from fashion advertisements. "I attempt to capture a new generation of modernized Asian urban/suburban dwellers who are caught up in the waves of globalization," Chen said in his statement.
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