Three graduate students of The University of Texas at Dallas, Eric Baze, Christi Nielsen and Diane McGurren, present three concurrent solo exhibitions in the Main and Mezzanine galleries of the university’s Visual Arts Building.

The works on view are varied, but all artists rely on photography and digital technology.  Eric Baze uses digital photography in the context of his installation emphasizing the human form. Diane McGurren's documentary project incorporates book arts, digital photography and installation.  Christi Nielsen combines both digital photography and video to create her performance-based imagery. 

Eric Baze explains his digital photographic print series, Idle Worship,as an exploration of “the beatification of the celebrity in contemporary culture.”  He “creates dense visual textures layered onto studies of the human form, focusing simultaneously on the flesh that binds us and our desire to transcend it.   At the center of his images, a luminous glow surrounds the figures, reminiscent of halos connoting sainthood while referencing the attraction of celebrity.  Fragments culled from the tabloid press become the skin on their naked bodies, part of the daily bread fed to us by the media.”

Diane McGurren’s exhibition is an installation of artist’s books combining photography and text documenting the rural town of Millsap, Texas, located 80 miles west of Dallas along FM 113. McGurren states, “Emphasizing the vernacular architecture, language and culture of Parker County, Farm to Market features five artist’s books, including both hand-bound volumes and a wall installation, accompanied by sculptural elements invoking the image of the clothesline so prevalent on the rural countryside.” 

According to Christi Nielsen, her exhibition, Faux Real, focuses “on our collective obsession with the ideal.”  Through her performance-based self-portraits, she heightens “viewers’ awareness of their own physical presence and prompts them to consider the plethora of information shaping the psyche, and consequently the physical.  Unlike performance art of the past, she places a distance between the viewer and her physical presence, creating personas that exist virtually.  These personas perform through text, pose, gesture and voice, communicating a response to mass media through characters that mimic the avatars of her virtual environment research.”