Artscape

Master's tournament

By Tracy Zollinger Turner

JAMES CHANCE PHOTO

Katie Shannon and Grant Fletcher

A middle-aged man stands next to the intensely orange and yellow Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, leaning slightly into his cane and staring off into space. His baseball cap holds a simple, well-worn message: "Money is the Root of All Evil."

A master's of fine arts student at Ohio State University, photographer Kate Shannon has a knack for finding disquieting moments tucked inside of the garish glories of carnival games and amusement park rides.

Whether it's the creepy gait of a Big Boy mascot wandering waterside at the Columbus Zoo, a Boy Scout with an American flag in front of a funnel cake stand or a chubby girl frosted in fuchsia and rainbow beads gripping her cell phone on the midway at the Ohio State Fair, Shannon's portraits are the ones you likely wouldn't place in the family scrapbook.

It started a little over a year ago, when she decided to explore the forced smiles and unnatural poses of family portraits.

"I started looking for these off moments, these un-photographic moments in between the situations where people are happy and posing for the camera," she said. "And the more I went, the more I wanted to go back."

Shannon and fellow photographer Grant Fletcher currently share an exhibition at ROY G BIV, although their official, shared MFA exhibition will take place June 4-8 at OSU's Hopkins Hall Gallery.

While Shannon's saturated colors and expressionless faces have a hyper-real quality, Fletcher makes ethereal some common, ordinarily ignored spaces from buildings around the Ohio State campus. The son of an architect, he clearly notices places most of us take for granted.

Using an alternative zone plate camera and lens to increase the glowing, halo effect of light, his large-scale images are of hallways, stairwells and exits, taken from the ground up to give them greater grandeur.

"These are transitional spaces," he explained. "I like to look at the way design and architecture flow around the people in the structure. The way the lens bends the light has a lot in common with the way we are forced to move around stairwells."

More MFA players

Charlie Roberts' high-definition video takes self-portraiture to a strange and disconcerting place. Over long moments in various pieces, he "erases" himself with shaving (or whipped) cream, frees his face from mounds of peanut butter (the sight of his breath breaking through it is actually quite disturbing) and binds his face in Band-Aids. His exhibition, Skin, is on view at Hopkins Hall through May 11.

An instructor for undergraduates in beginning drawing techniques, Sunny Belliston creates conceptual paintings and collages that have the look of weathered wood floors and peeling paint. She and photographer Kisha Smith exhibit their work at Hopkins Hall Gallery May 14-18, with an opening-night reception from 5-7 p.m.

LaTreice Branson has used the same mirror for self-portraits since she was a teenager. After experiences such as being the valedictorian of her undergraduate class, s pageant winner and a Christian stand-up comedian, she rounds things out with an MFA in photography. Her Cindy Sherman-esque show Face 2 Face: Mirrored Self Portraits will be on exhibit June 8 to July 27 at OSU's Hale Black Cultural Center. The opening reception is June 8, 5-7:30 p.m.

May 10th, 2007

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