By Hutch Whitman and Elisa Castillo
On a Thursday evening earlier this month, students in UC Santa Barbara’s Honors Arts Program opened their studio spaces to the public — the first time they have held such an event since 2020.
Visitors saw that two studio rooms are split into nine sectors, one for each student of the highly competitive program. This becomes their space to freely create. The studio spaces are tucked inconspicuously outside and underneath UCSB’s Arts Building. With these “secret” rooms on display, viewers strolled through the studios to observe the students’ completed and ongoing works.
Entering the studio is like stepping inside of a kaleidoscope — colors and shapes of all forms dominate the space. A massive collage of pink, yellow and blue fabrics hangs from the ceiling, meant to emulate the colors seen through closed eyes. Portraits draped in various flora hang along the walls. A stop motion video of a clay mass folding into itself, consistently shape shifting into new body parts and shapes, plays on the central table.
Grace Warren
Having strangers in the space was an unfamiliar experience for some of the artists, such as Grace Warren. “It’s cool and weird. It’s very much my private space, and it's never this clean,” she said. “Especially in the basement we’re very tucked away so it's nice to have people come in and actually see what we’ve been doing and how we prepare for shows.”
Warren is a third-year student and the program’s youngest member, as it is typically reserved for fourth-year students. She has used the space to explore humanity, mentality, and gender within her art. A central piece of her studio is a pair of self-portraits where her face is hidden behind flowers and grass, with only her eyes piercing through.
“I focus a lot on anthropomorphism, just humans' relationship with their environment and how those intersect. In the most literal sense these are about camouflage and the things people put value on,” she said. “Flowers are pretty much universally seen as something good and allowed to keep growing, where grass is cut down and demonized,” she said.
Warren’s art goes beyond one medium – paintings, wood burnings, and spiderwebs made of string all decorate her space. She stressed that having a studio has been beneficial to her artistic exploration. “I definitely feel like having this space has pushed me to try new mediums, because I have the space and time and material to do it.”
Madeleine Galas
For fourth-year Art and Art History major Madeleine Galas, the exhibition was a nice change from the typical isolation of working in the enclosed studios. “We never know what time it is. There’s no windows,” she said. “It’s great because you can really get into the zone. But it’s nice having people here.”
Galas’ space is covered in drawings, paintings and installations suspended from the ceiling. A series of small pieces surrounded by wooden borders displays colorful, intricate paintings of abstract shapes. Galas aimed to replicate phosphenes, the patterns we see when we close our eyes tightly. Another work featured a collage of small sketches — a cat, the letter G and a graduation tassel among others — dedicated to the objects she associates with her mother. She is interested in memory and how she can convey its sensation through different forms of art.
“Lots of memory and perception … because it’s something everyone can relate to. It’s different while being universal,” she said. “Just memory and dreams and things you can’t really see — intangible things.”
Galas said it was useful to hear new opinions on her art. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t make enough or I have insecurities, but when people come in here it’s really nice to hear what they have to say.”
Marlene Goodman
Marlena Goodman, another fourth-year honors student, also said she appreciated the event. “It’s nice to get feedback from people that are not just my classmates and professors.”
Goodman displayed projects in an array of mediums. Drawings and photographs depicted the female body while a laptop in the corner of the space played a video on loop.
“I feel like my art is an exploration of the feminine grotesque and what it means to have a body, specifically a female body, and what that entails from a psychological perspective as well as physical,” she said. “I’m fascinated with the abject and the gross things we try to keep behind closed doors.”
Overseeing the event was Art Department faculty memer Alex Lukas, who teaches the honors students. Lukas said he and the Honors Art program feel it is more crucial than ever to give others a look at what the students create.
“Our hope is really to bring more of the university community in to see what our students are doing. I think especially after the pandemic when we all… became more reliant on creative practices,” he said. “Whether it is the Netflix you’re watching or the painting on your wall that you’ve been staring at for a year and a half, the importance of visual material has only been heightened.”
The Honors Arts students will have another show this spring in the UCSB Art, Design, and Architecture Museum.
Hutch Whitman is a third-year Ecology/Evolution major. Elisa Castillo is a third-year English and Dance double major. They wrote this article for their Writing Program course, Digital Journalism.