Jowhara Alsaud Photography: Solitary Confinement is not so Lonely (or so it appears) by Heidi Marston

Photography has always borrowed aesthetics from painting and drawing, and then depending on the trend of the time, Painting has returned the favor. I have always been interested in that intersection in artists like Gerhard Richter, Sandy Skogland, and many others. I encourage you to check out this site if you are also interested in this kind of work:

www.jowharaalsaud.com

. . Jowhara Alsaud is a recent MFA Grad from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her work uses photographic composition with the look of drawings that have dark outlines and have then been colored in. The images are both playful and tense, though the figure is never unmasked and seems forever to be alone; she never seems to have a gesture of loneliness.
In one series of images, the character in these small visual skits is playing solitaire. Now we have all thought at one time or another, "only lonely geeks play solitaire.", but at the same time we have all tried it, and probably have gotten really into it, but would never admit it. Here is a series of 30 x 40 prints of playing solitaire set up in a public gallery. There seems to be a feeling of waiting, we have all played spoliator at some point in our lives while waiting: waiting for someone or something. In Alsaud's installation at the Aidekman Art Center I got the feeling that this character was waiting for me to get it, you know, get the joke, get the point, get something. Here in this exhibition is, maybe the artist herself, actually there in front of me, playing solitaire and waiting for me to figure out the story, or maybe the relationship between the stories. In an almost graphic novel style Alsaud has taken a form of "drawing" that has long been considered "comic book" style and turned it into "narrative photography" considered by some a more acceptable format for a gallery exhibit. The point is Alsaud made interesting imagery combining several mediums and whether someone wants to see it one way or another, there is no way to not be interested in some part of the story. But somehow I felt that the only way I was going to get it was to let go of any preconceiveded notions of photography, so I got out my deck of cards and began to play along.

5 DEGREES OF INSPIRATION (featuring Ben Sloat, Curator of Fresh Fiction)

5 DEGREES OF INSPIRATION
Author(s): CATE McQUAID, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT Date: May 6, 2005 Page: D26 Section: Arts
Art schools are the breeding ground for tomorrow's hot new talents. Boston, home to three strong art schools - Boston University, the Massachusetts College of Art, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts - has been the launching pad for many brilliant careers. All three programs have MFA thesis shows up now. We took a look around and found five up-and-comers.
HANNAH COLE, 26, PAINTER BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Cole finds magic in the ordinary: a snuggling couple, scenes from the driver's seat of her car. Her paintings have a spooky realism, heightened by her dusky palette and eye for the luminous. Look out for her work at Alpha Gallery's New Talent show in June.
"I'm interested in the habits and rituals and the mundane things that people do, the times you lose awareness of yourself," Cole says. "There's the painting of my boyfriend and I brushing our teeth: You don't think about it, but being there in the bathroom together is so intimate. With the car paintings, the windshield is a metaphor for painting. It's a window into the world outside. The car becomes a frame for the world.
"At BU, I've worked harder than I've ever worked in my life. What I've come to understand is that art is fundamental to all humans. You can be more educated about it, but no one can have a more human response to it than anyone else. I'm attracted to non-abstract art because it connects to people. The beauty is an entrance into the work." BEN SLOAT, 27, PHOTOGRAPHER
"Inside the Whale," Sloat's photo installation, leads the viewer into a darkened room to witness two projections of sequential images: one of boys around a bonfire, the other of gulls wheeling through the blue sky. The two subjects strike a balance between the contemplative and combustible. Sloat's work will be in a group show at Bernard Toale Gallery in June.
"My mother is from Taiwan," Sloat says. "When I told her about this, she said, 'That's a combination of yin and yang: Yin is the heat, the fire, the dark, and yang is the cool blue in the sky.
"I think of the allegory of Plato's Cave. Plato had this idea that people are bound, and watching shadows on the wall of a cave cast by the fire behind them - and they think it's reality. Unbound, you can turn around and see sunlight and move toward liberation. It's about seeing and how you gain knowledge through sunlight.
"I went to college at UC Berkeley. The undergrad school had 30,000 people. At the Museum School, you have intimate relationships, you're sharing ideas, learning different ways to approach art. Being an artist is having the ability to say something. It gives us a way to confront issues. But I don't want to offer any answers. I want to ask questions. That's about as empowering as it gets."
EVAN KARATZAS, 32, NEW-MEDIA ARTIST MASSACHUSETTS COLLEGE OF ART
Karatzas has created the installation "Proximity Lab." It's a platform loaded with antennae that uses psychedelic optical effects to track how close people get to one another and identifies the least interactive member of a group. Fun and provocative, "Proximity Lab" prods viewers to work together and to reflect on their own socialboundaries.
"The idea was to look at how we use proximity to communicate," Karatzas says. "We use it subconsciously all the time. We interact with computers all the time - you click on a button and you know what will happen. But in physical space, you can be interacting with a system in degrees. How close you get to the system and to the people opens up nuances. You're put in a situation where you have to think about what's happening. You want to see users come and create new ways of interacting with the system. That's the Holy Grail.
"New-media artists work on so many levels - conceptual, visual, sound, sensors and electronics, programming, physical fabrication. It's a very steep hill. No one person can develop systems at this scale. You need collaborators.
"At MassArt, I was part of the Dynamic Media Institute, the graduate design program. Boundaries between disciplines are not as clear as they used to be. Technology is seeping into all of them."
RI ANDERSON, 35, PHOTOGRAPHER
MASSACHUSETTS COLLEGE OF ART
Anderson has been shooting and showing photos for more than a decade; her black-and-white images have had a film-noir edge and a persistent, bruised vulnerability. In her thesis show, she's moved into color to explore the depth and rawness of mother-daughter relationships, focusing on the women in her own family. The photos have a potent, fairy-tale mix of succor and threat.

"People said your work is going to change when you go to grad school," Anderson says. "I had a baby at the same time. Change isn't the word it was explosive. My work got more personal about the psychology of being a mother and a daughter, the archetypes of women. I was thinking about early Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and child, and moving into color photography. My father was a minister, so I was around these paintings growing up. Having a kid made me think of them again.

"A lot of this work is about vulnerability. It's so scary to be responsible for this child. There are so many more worries. The pictures have this weightlessness, a floating quality, a feeling like a dream. There's this sense of being separate, but being together."

CHARLIE COLLIDGE, 51, SCULPTOR
SCHOOL OF THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS AND TUFTS UNIVERSITY
Coolidge fashioned "Container Cottage" completely from packaging material; even the lumber comes from old crates. There's a lovely tension between its scathing commentary on a disposable society and its dollhouse charm.

"The US has 2 percent of the world's population, but I believe we use 25 percent of the world's resources," Coolidge says. "This tries to address that. And homelessness. We've gotten out of control with the notion of home, of what people buy and put into their homes. The wall covering inside is all from the Home and Living sections of the Globe and The New York Times, and catalogs from Crate & Barrel and Restoration Hardware.

"I've been making assemblages since I was 12 or 13, although I didn't show them. I worked in business for 20 years. I was happy in the evening, putting things together from things that had been thrown out. I couldn't tell my colleagues I'd been scavenging in a Dumpster the night before.

"I came to a point where I could continue, or get formal training as an artist. It was a bit of a shock to be in art school, it took a little time to get acclimated. I learned what I do isn't all that odd. It fits into the contemporary art world."

NOW SHOWING

Museum School/Tufts MFA thesis exhibition (the MFA is a joint degree from both schools). At Tufts University Art Gallery, Aidekman Arts Center, 40R Talbot Ave., Medford, through May 22. 617-627-3518, www.smfa.edu, www.tufts.edu/as/gallery

Massachusetts College of Art MFA thesis exhibition. At MassArt's Bakalar Gallery, 621 Huntington Ave., through May 7. 617-879-7333, www.massart.edu

Boston University MFA painting thesis exhibition. At BU's 808 Gallery, 808 Commonwealth Ave., through May 8. 617-353-3371, www.bu.edu/cfa