The Pence Gallery will again display the cutting edge art of first year graduate students from UC Davis’ Master of Fine Arts program. Work by six artists will be on display: Julia Elsas, Crystal Haueter, Cynthia Horn, Robin Kibby, Evie Leder, and Joshua Short.

Artist Crystal Haueter’s mixed media work combines images of organic, knotted items, to evoke a memory of “things mostly living and closely observed.” She plays with creating a jumbled, compacted space in her work. Julia Elsas’ installation piece covers a significant area of gallery with stacked shelves of her own books. Arranged by color, these books function as signs or clues of the artist herself. As she states, “Art is a secret shared between the individual and the collective.” Joshua Short’s installation piece is situated outside, with a focus on pro-wrestling as the source “of inspiration and investigation into contemporary social interaction and ritual in our technological society.” Painter Cynthia Horn’s large oil paintings combine aspects of both abstraction and representation. Small figures, originally pulled from family photographs provide a contrast to their ambiguous background setting. Evie Leder works in video, combining images and sound to evoke an emotional response. As she states, her video is “intentionally evocative and disorienting to generate disturbances that allow some essence of truth to emerge”. Robin Kibby’s oil paintings emphasize portals, using highway structures to frame the city, as she states, “By contrasting a massive cement form to the urban ecology, the texture of the city is brought into relief.” We invite the public to meet the artists and view their works at our reception on Friday, May 30th from 7-9 pm.