2011 Welcome Back Show

The Welcome Back show at Mason Gross was a very diverse and intriguing show to view. The variety in mediums and experience made the show very interesting. I don't particularly like saying someone's art is good or bad because all art has a meaning. I believe if someone thinks a piece of art is "bad" then they didn't understand it correctly.
Since we had to choose our favorite piece and least favorite piece, I went by what was visually alluring and which wasn't. My favorite piece was by Steve Orlando who did drawings on handmade paper. Although I am a design major, my next favorite art form is drawing, especially intricate drawing. This piece had a different part of nature within the symbols. + had trees, - had mountains, > was oceans, < was desert. The way they were rendered were very intricate and had tight details and a great greyscale making the piece dynamic and realistic. The piece almost had a double positive space because from afar we see shapes but up close we see a scene. I'm sure there was a reason that each piece of nature was put into a specific symbol. My guess probably sounds silly but I think that it means we need to add more trees, we don't have enough mountains and we have more oceans than deserts. I feel as though it's an environmental awareness piece and I found myself looking at it the longest out of the whole gallery.
My least favorite piece, or the one I didn't understand at all was Rita Leduc's "Around Nodal Point Winding Outward". I didn't understand the meaning of the piece or use of materials. I question if the piece was experimental and if so, if there was a direction/point it was trying to make. On the other hand sometimes art doesn't have to make sense, but it also wasn't appealing at all to me. I also didn't understand they random way the individual pieces were hung. It seems as though the pieces can only work as individuals and don't work together as a whole. The one thing I do like about the piece are some of the organic shapes.