Among the three annual student art exhibitions showing up this time of year at Westmont College, Santa Barbara City College and UCSB, SBCC brings on the most generous doses of varietal spice. It is partly a matter of numbers, given the inherently diverse pool of SBCC art students compared to Westmont’s modest senior art class and the intentionally limited group of UCSB MFA candidates.
As expected, this year's student art exhibition at SBCC’s Atkinson Gallery is rich with diversity — of skill levels, mediums, and artistic intentions. But the show, organized by gallery director John Connelly, manages to avoid the piled-high, traffic jam syndrome of some past student shows here. Thanks to judicious use of gallery space and installation logic on the walls and on the sculpture-crowded floor space, the viewing is more inviting than overwhelming.
Thematic- and medium-based grouping helps in the clarifying process. This selection, for instance, is well-populated with charcoal and other drawing works, linked to the “Fundamentals of Drawing” class. Young artists come to the drawing tradition from different angles, from the detailed and intricate mesh of Victoria Mejia Vega’s suitably titled “Dreamy,” to the soft-edged and almost retro-futurist vision of Molly Tooley’s “Abstract Charcoal.” Tooley’s M.C. Escher–like sketchy piece “Shadow Box” celebrates its own spatial illogic of staircases going … somewhere.