The Spingold Theater Center was filled with the energetic bustle of hundreds of visitors at the opening of the Senior Studio Show April 29. Twenty Brandeis senior artists-five sculptors and 15 painters and printmakers-had their best works from the year on display. The pieces were clean and purposeful with strong lines, sharp color divides and grounding perspectives which left me with feelings of warmth and comfort. Though seemingly unintentional, the works played off one another to create a show that caused the viewer to consider the human, physically and emotionally, in relation to the environment. When asked about this continuous theme, artist Brian Price '08 said, "You rub off on one another and use classmates as inspiration. It's pretty cool." It was pretty cool. In my opinion, this was one of the strongest senior studio shows seen at Brandeis in recent years.

Sculptor Lily Olsen's '08 work was a conglomeration of birdhouses that grew upwards from a series of platforms and ladders. When asked about her motivation, Olsen recalled the emotions and ideas of the kindergarten and preschool self. The proximity of the hard birdhouses created a cold, geometric form, but she masterfully softened her work through the use of Ping-Pong balls, which add a spherical element between her structures. Her art is interactive and sophisticated, yet full of whimsical touches that bring a smile to the viewer's face.

Rachel Pfeffer '08 reuses her chair and ottoman suite made of dismembered stuffed animals in her latest work, entitled A Room of Their Own. Since her studio is located on Prospect Street, Pfeffer took multiple pictures of her space and compiled a book showing the room's development. The book rests on top of her sculpture of a peep-hole mailbox. Pfeffer said her installation led to this mailbox creation, a piece which relates to people, houses and the suburbs. Her colorful mailbox was filled with rich visual elements like backlighting, giving it a heightened sense of depth. By inviting the viewer to peer into the mailbox within the larger space, themes of voyeurism come into play.

While Pfeffer and Olsen both toyed with suburban elements, Price and Adie Sprague '08 let their works speak for the city and society. Price combined his architectural model of the new World Trade Center in New York with drawings and photography. This is a personal work for Price, who is from New York and marvels that "all these years later, there is still nothing there." His skyscraper sat on top of an acrylic case containing the remnants of Ground Zero, serving as a continual reminder of what sat in the space originally and creates a haunting memorial. Starting with the ivy at the top of the building, there are three levels of vegetation. The second level rests on top of Ground Zero, and the base platform contains a surrounding landscape with live sod and plants, of which no two are alike. Price said he used different plants to reflect New York's diversity.

Sprague continued to use her string sculptures as seen in last semester's show, but combined these with a series of boxes situated above and below the sculptures. The strings undulate in a variety of colors, each corresponding to a specific race. The densities of these colors relate to the respective high school graduation rates by race, with the boxes falling through the string-a metaphor for students falling through the cracks.

Jonathan Zornow's '08 machine, Robotticelli, is a printer that has been adapted to print on wet plaster, creating frescos. After studying abroad in England and traveling through Italy and France, he said he desired to one day have a fresco in his home but believed it would be too expensive to hire someone to paint it. That motivated him to modify an ink-jet printer to produce such works. There are still a few kinks in the system (such as an inability to print in yellow), but this only adds to the nature of the piece; even when art is done by a computer, there are still mistakes.

The painters in this show pushed themselves as well. Eileen Ani '08 based her series of paintings on her travels abroad, combining many locations in a single canvas. Made up mostly of scenes from Montreal, Amsterdam and the Prospect Street Studio, her art dealt as much with the cultural context and inspiration of a piece as it did with the act of painting.

Artists Naomi Safran-Hon '08 and Adrienne Johnson '08 also used the memory of location within their art. Safran-Hon, a native Israeli, created photographic transfers of her pictures, many of which are personal and relate to Israeli politics, and combined them with political maps of the area and oil painting. Johnson, in addition to her two soapbox derby coffins, painted Like Two Lives Bound for Separate Coasts. The 73-by-60-inch canvas is based on an unfinished poem about growing up. Her boyfriend was a train-hopper, and this is represented in the work. The work also symbolized two people from her life that have passed away in drug-related deaths The surrealist work also servse as a memorial.

Pieces by other artists such as Jacqueline Fox '08, Tanya Fredman '08 and Shira Espo '08 also emphasize portraiture. Fox's self-portrait, Behind the Looking Glass, is based on a picture of her as a little girl, taken two days before her grandmother's death. This painting was one of two self-portraits in the show for Fox.

Fredman painted four portraits of individuals important to her personal growth. Her work Reebs is of her friend lying on her bed, surrounded by symbols of her personality that made it easy for the audience to understand her. In her painting of Gabe Gaskins '08, the subject stares directly out at the viewer, meeting the viewer's gaze with his own. In this way, Fredman expresses the subject's true nature.

Artists Jennifer Kwak '08 and Laura Francis '08 also produced portraits. Kwak used her friends as models in her accordion-shaped work, gluing slices of canvas on top of plywood rectangles in two angles. By adding mirrors, Kwak defines the viewer as the victim while adding shock appeal. Francis started experimenting with oil stick during a "painting roadblock," and it led to a fantastic growth in her work. Her impasto adds depth and volume to her odd figural compositions, and her canvases trap the viewers' gaze. Olsen's work represents childhood, while Francis' painting Nephin, is of a child who looks strangely grown up.

Rachel Silverman '08 and Scott Moerdler '08 used strong colors to delineate their canvases. This semester, Moerdler has been working on a series of paintings of "nerbuls" which he defines as things related biology but evolved from our organs. In Nerbul 1, the large pink nerbul sat on a thick green platform in the bottom half of the canvas. The colors are fresh, but there is something disturbing and almost sickly in his work as well. Silverman's most notable work is The Art of Dance, which showed multiple figures in various positions.

Daniele Kohn's '08 work makes one think of the human thought process and progression of ideas. What started off as still lives of fruit and Christmas tree ornaments led to her hanging objects in a grid to eliminate the inclusion of a table. This eventually resulted in hanging Hershey's Kisses and painting their reflections from the light that entered a nearby window.

The last four artists in the show created works about nature. Nina Rogowsky's '08 painting of a fish has an intriguing luminosity to it. At first glance, it seems to be in black and white, but raw umber tones are visible and give the work an earthy quality. Stephanie Leighton '08 painted birds, but her works screamed through vibrant colors. Her piece, titled Kias, measures 60 by 73-inches, making the birds seem larger than life. Their knowing gazes gave them an element of humanity, yet their foreign colors made them seem otherworldly.

Jill Edinburg's '08 series of prints of trees and forests all portray similar scenes. She said the works had strong organic quality and loved trees because of their distinctive shape. The art of Aiko Nishioka '08 also focuses on trees and forests. In Untitled, two large trees in differing shades of brown hug the edges of the canvas. Within the landscape, the browns, whites and grays are overshadowed by hints of blues and greens that make the painting come to life. Nishioka paints primarily in local Mt. Feake Cemetery, and this somber locale seems to be reflected in the overcast background of her works, although she states the location was not important. She sees trees as possessing a power and energy that relate to the sizes of her canvases.

This show, which ended May 18, represented the wealth of artistic talent within the Brandeis community. Congratulations are in order for these graduating students. I'm sure they all have great futures ahead of them.