College Collective show opens Friday

All four gallery spaces at the Genesee Center for the Arts & Education will be dedicated to exhibits of photography, ceramics and book arts for College Collective, a national juried show featuring current college students and alumni within two years of graduation.

Fifty-five emerging artists from 42 colleges in 22 states are participating in the show, opening Friday.

“It’s a chance for us to see what’s happening in these university programs,” says Kate Wharton, director of the center’s ceramics program. “Artists often have access to equipment they wouldn’t have access to once they’re out on their own, so it’s this time of great experimentation and creativity. They’re finding their voice, and their work is often very innovative. It’s going to be a very interesting show.”

Two local artists — printmaker and painter Laura Wilder and ceramic artist Peter Pincus — and Chicago-based photographer Myra Greene were judges.

This is the first exhibition for Audrey An, a student at the NYS College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Her piece, a wall installation made of undulating and static white stoneware tiles, is titled “Impressed Geometries.”

“We have really awesome facilities” at school, says the 22-year-old. “We have this class where I learned the basics of 3-D modeling and prototyping, and I used a software program called Rhino to design my piece. I used to think of ceramics as just making things by hand, or throwing on the wheel. Now I know what’s available to me.”

Ethan Snow, 25, who graduated this spring from San Diego State University, has two ceramic pieces in the show inspired by society’s fascination with technology and its implications for religion.

“I wanted to make sacred objects that captured how enamored everyone is with technology, so I put patterns on them that represent abstractions of circuit boards,” he explains. “I tried to make them as intricate as possible to give them a sacred, holy feel. They’re supposed to be objects of worship, like relics, but they’re more like urns because they’re lidded jars. You can assemble and disassemble them.”

Amanda Kralovic, with a bachelor’s degree in illustration from Central Connecticut State University and a master’s degree in printmaking from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, has three pieces in the show. Two are lithographs, one of which is her master’s thesis titled “Preparation and Recovery” — a sequence of 40 8-by-8 tiles, half of them showing a swimmer preparing for a race, the other half showing the swimmer recovering from the race.

“Everybody prepares for something and recovers from something on a daily basis,” she says.

For her other work, Kralovic, 34, used five zinc etching plates to create an intaglio book piece she calls “Falling Water.”

“It’s a movable book with a waterfall effect,” she says. “I want people to look at my work and feel something.”

If You Go

What: College Collective

When: Friday through July 16; opening reception Friday from 6 to 9 p.m.

Where: Genesee Center for the Arts & Education, 713 Monroe Ave.

Info: www.rochesterarts.org