3rd Annual Student Photography Exhibition
The Art Gallery @ GCC
July 1-24, 2015


Liza Brozek Boyer

The Art Gallery showcased the work of students in the photography department at Glendale Community College. The eight students chosen to participate in this year’s exhibition demonstrate a wide variety of photographic interests and styles.

Several of the photographers in this show call into question our ways of seeing the world. In Harrison Scantling’s series Sunland, art is created from the everyday as he explores Sunland by foot, finding mystery, decay, and hidden messages in the often-missed details of a car dominated landscape. In Ajar, Raquel Davis creates beautifully unsettling black and white images that question our notion of reality. She asks us, “When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.” Liza Brozek Boyer challenges our conventional ways of seeing in the softly ephemeral photographs in Urban Reflections that exist somewhere between reality and dreams. Susanna Castillo asks us to recall the objects of childhood and contemplate their fate in the land of the forgotten and misplaced. Hayk Kirakosyan leaves the idea of the abstract and creates a chillingly medical depiction of death in his sparse image of a morgue. Though this image seems straightforward and simple, he shot several images as a panorama to get the exact framing needed and removed all details that would distract from the matter of fact quality of this image.

The last three photographers in this show focus on portraiture. Marina Lypiridou uses portraiture to invite us into the lives of the elderly in her series, Beauty is Ageless. Her compassionate images reveal the beauty and wisdom that come with age. In contrast, David Matias focuses on the young and beautiful as he explores fashion photography in his black and white series, Emotions. Emilia Abrahamsson takes a straightforward portrait and uses Photoshop to create an evocative image through the combination of disparate images of skyscrapers, smoke, and a head in profile.