Exhibit shows off promising art majors

The sound of dripping water echoes throughout the building, drawing you toward the mysterious mound of white plaster shards rising out of the cold, gray concrete floor.

Cal State Long Beach artist Nina Jun squats next to the mound, holding the remote control to a videocassette recorder buried within. The tape rewinds and the dripping begins again.

The piece is based on burial mounds from her native Korea, said Jun, a graduate student majoring in sculpture.

She used her feet to flatten down a sheet of plaster, which she broke into pieces and piled up around a TV monitor displaying red water dripping into a pond lined with the same broken shards.

"Red is for blood, blood is life," Jun said. "American culture thinks red is violence, but to me red is life."

At the top of the 4-foot mound, two feet appear on the monitor and begin to dabble in the pond of red water. The water continues to drip onto the feet, splattering them in red while the tranquil sounds of gurgling and dripping water contrast with the reality that this is a burial mound.
 

Jun's work is part of "Insights 2000: The Annual Student Exhibition" that opened last week in the University Art Museum. Visitors will be stunned by the artistic achievements of students.

CSULB's College of the Arts is California's largest publicly funded school for the arts and the product of the department is an amazing array of pieces in a wide variety of media.

Melissa Maxfield Beall's "Conversations II" stands out, though it is tucked into a corner where it sits like a giant, beautiful spider's den. Looking closer, the black ink lines painted on the wall and the strands of black thread holding large pebbles with Aztec-looking ink swirls reveal abstract floral patterns.

You walk away, try to focus your eyes on the piece and walk back up to it, trying to come to terms with the complexity of "Conversations II." Beall's work, like that of most artists on display, works on multiple levels.

Jasmine Delgado and Mireya Alonzo offer whimsical pieces reflecting Latino culture in the tradition of Mexican surrealism. Alonzo's sculpture, featuring Mexican wrestling masks apparently made from kitchen table clothes, sits next to a powerful piece by Eric Brady. Brady's "Deconstruction" features imprints of hard-hatted blue-collar workers and Marxist texts on steel-framed drywall.

Styles ranging from commercial art to oil paintings rich in color and powerful in their ability to speak to the viewer hang among pieces of beautiful jewelry from the hand of Chris Kudo.

By the quality of every piece in this exhibit, it is obvious that CSULB is having a profound effect on the next generation of California's artists.