Exhibitions showcasing professors and teaching artists from a given institution of learning can serve a double-duty function, but observers’ assumptions and predispositions can get tricky. From one perspective, faculty artist forums — such as the intriguing current show Lines of Inquiry at Westmont College’s Ridley-Tree Museum of Art — can seem like a chance to get a glimpse of what’s behind the curricular curtain of a school.
But to whatever degree the art on display at the museum indicates the feel and focus of the present Westmont Art Department, and how these mentoring artists might impact their students’ art, another presiding agenda is at work here. The exhibition is primarily an overview of a necessarily diversified group of artists in their own right, and each with personal directions, styles, and messages to convey.
Said diversity, also a factor baked into the college’s interest in representing different media within its art faculty, is immediately apparent upon entering the entryway gallery space. On one wall, we find the pleasant photography of Brad Elliott, whose written statement, “I’m never not a photographer,” bears out his practice of capturing slices of found scenery. These include an infrared-like image on a trail, and such local visions as beach-centric takes on a lifeguard station and a distant oil rig. Elsewhere, fire rips and ripples through a hillside in “HELP,” with a fitting rough-focused urgency.