St Edward’s College, Cottonera, has organised a rich and varied exhibition of students’ work in a well-lit magnificent hall at the college.
Shaun Galea and Jessica Rainbow exhibited about 30 works which are the result of their International Baccalaureate (IB Visual Arts), a two-year course at the college under the direction of their art teacher Denise Papagiorcopulo.
The exhibition forms part of the internal and external assessment of the course.
The exhibition is professionally set up and presented, and reflects the hard work, research and enthusiasm of both students and art teacher.
Galea is best represented by Emma, a cubist synthetic portrait in beautiful reds that dominates the hall, together with The Self by Rainbow.
The Self is a prestigious work in photography representing the artist in different postures and moods, facets of the same personality and projecting the complexity of human nature in the individual.
In the background lies another portrait hanging on the wall to decorate the space. This by itself constitutes art.
Galea’s abstraction of Emma is influenced by the Braque-Picasso duo vision of 1909 in the Cubist concept. Tainted Love by Galea is a ceramic sculpture that delves into the pain of homosexual love and in the same vein of social realism is his installation: Torture Bedroom about the cruelty of Japanese soldiers to women, reminiscent of The Bedroom by Tracy Emin.
This work really instills disgust and abhorrence.
The Touch by Rainbow is a large mural in the form of a gridded photograph featuring the sense of touch and its possible emotional consequences. The effect is very convincing and surely the result of maturity.
Rainbow studied art at advanced level in a Science and Technology College in Britain and such preparation reflects in her work.
Galea also impresses with a series of four photographic works of a leaf seen under a microscope, and The Model, a life-size female mannequin dressed up in clothes designed by the student and produced from recycled material such as black garbage bags and newspapers, materials actually used by modern designers.
Rainbow has a lovely torso to her credit which was cast in plaster of Paris and covered by a collage, cuttings from women’s magazines.
The material and techniques used indicate the idea of students working in a master’s bottega. The exhibition includes painting and sculpture, printing techniques (silkscreen and linocut), casting, use of computer programmes such as Photoshop, short films, metal work, welding and recycling of various materials such as plastic bags, cardboard, old keys, wrappers and other assorted objects.
The students also designed their own poster for the exhibition, influenced by Richard Hamilton.
The range of artists that influenced the students during the course is quite varied, starting with Damian Hirst and Tracy Emin and including artists like Richard Hamilton, Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Dalí and local Maltese artists like Antoine Camilleri and Carmelo Apap.
This surfaces in the expressive manner the exhibition is presented, in the individual works, in the vision and concept of the course designed around the students’ interests by a dedicated teacher of art and the sustained impact on the viewer.