Tucked away in the corner of the second floor of the George Sherman Union, an exhibition of recent work by two Boston University School of Visual Arts alumni and faculty offers a temporary tranquil recluse for students.
The exhibition at the Sherman Gallery, sponsored by the College of Fine Arts SVA and organized by Exhibitions Director Lynne Cooney, features textured canvas oil paintings and linoleum block prints from SVA lecturer Jill Grimes and carved and painted wooden sculptures and reliefs of humans and animals from SVA assistant professor of sculpture Sachiko Akiyama.
‘There is a slowness to our work, a process of trying to find something. For me it’s like gradually uncovering these forms, and she slowly builds it up,’ said Akiyama, who first met Grimes when they were attending Brandeis College for a post-baccalaureate certificate in studio art eleven years ago.
Students said the stillness of these works remains palpable in the small gallery.
‘The sculptures seemed very peaceful. I really like the environment of this gallery,’ said Tania Mesta, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Akiyama, who was named by The Boston Globe as one of the ’10 Artists to Watch’ in 2006, said she did not carve a wood sculpture until her junior year at Amherst College.
‘It was a skill I had to teach myself and has not come without its share of scrapes,’ she said, noting the time she cut halfway through her finger with a handsaw.
She said her sculptures and reliefs of peaceful people, birds and bears in the exhibition were inspired by the fairytale and folklore aspect of animals and the desire to capture little surreal moments.
To make a sculpture, Akiyama said she starts with planks of soft basswood, two inches thick and eight feet long, glued side-to-side. Next she begins working at it with a chain saw, then gradually moves to hand tools and finally paints the wood sculpture with thin layers of oil paint, a process that can take a year or longer for a large sculpture.
Grimes said her painting style evolved during her time as a graduate student at SVA, where she received her Master of Fine Arts in 2003.
‘When I came to BU as a grad student, I was painting still life paintings with objects, very realistically,’ Grimes said. ‘I eventually took all of the objects out of the still life and I had fabric in the back behind these objects. I had pared down the paintings to only looking at that fabric in the back.’
Her inspiration for many of the pieces in the exhibition was a piece of white cotton fabric from a thrift store, the texture and wrinkles of which she said she delicately captured. Grimes also spends time with other art mediums such as oil paintings, which take her between four and eight months to complete.
One of Grimes’ former students, CAS sophomore Troy Hannigan, said the gallery did not feature the kind of art he usually enjoys, and he was ‘a little disappointed.’
‘I tend not to appreciate abstract art as much. I prefer realistic art,’ Hannigan said. ‘As far as the sculptures, I think I would like them better if they were not painted because it flattens them and makes them more simplistic.’
The exhibition, which runs through Feb. 26, has received an overall positive response and is visited by about three dozen people a day, said gallery assistant and Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences freshman Lucien Rizzo.
‘I haven’t really seen stuff like this before,’ said CAS sophomore Tiegan Hatch. ‘It’s different.’