"Oh, To Return"

Attending Cornish College of the Arts' 2025 Junior Art Showcase

Close-Up Image of Logan Worth's "When My Wandering Meanderings Have Finally Reached Their End"

Is home somewhere you’ve been before? Somewhere you’re looking towards? Is the idea of nostalgia, recollection, and reflection inherently flawed, biased due to personality? Cornish College of the Arts’ 2024-25 Junior class reflects on these topics and more in their group show: “Oh, To Return.” The exhibition boasts pieces from the class’s twelve artists, in mixed mediums and formats ranging from soft sculpture quilting to photography and oil painting. Through juxtapositions of form, subject, and presentation, the artists cultivate a joint retrospective on origin and homecoming as young people of the current day.

Between deeply political work critiquing the American ideal and exploratory pieces contemplating personal identity lies a common ground of positionality, placing oneself in a liminal space and attempting to look outward. Each artist’s individual piece contributes to a broader narrative, but they also weave together, displaying the unique skills and personalities of their creators. Hosted in the Benke Gallery, open walls, bright windows, and high ceilings frame the pieces and cast their shadows upon one another, incorporating even the most seemingly separate of works. A diptych of self-pleasure toys abstracted into bright colors and shapes feels at home beside a neon-backed oil portrait of a woman among flowers. The atmosphere of pieces, where colors and tones bleed into the surrounding works, is indicative of the studio spaces they came from.

While each piece stands out in its own right, a few lingered as significant in retrospect. Cloe Short’s entrancing oil painting, titled “what so proudly we hailed,” is a brutal and honest examination of America’s commercialized violence, with toy soldiers, pigeons, and digital pop-ups woven together on its expansive canvas. Streamers of proud and decorative ribbon guide a viewer’s eyes through the work, highlighting new details and moments of pointed precision. Short’s brush quality and dancerly technique lay out each symbol of significance in practiced light, inviting the viewer to critique the media they consume as well as the causes they support.

In a separate vein, Christy Gibson’s “Aliasing (Reredos)” paints a domestic and introspective view of the ideas of preservation and community, following a previous trail in the artist’s work examining the altars within a modern. The three-paneled oil painting depicts figures on a sidewalk painted in striking greens and purples. Reaching over the subjects, however, is an inserted, iridescent castle, supported by a secondary facade vertically situated on the rightmost panel. These altars, indications of both fantasy and religious sanctuary, support the artist’s contemplation of permanence and memory, with an additional digital context. Supported by the work’s bright colors and overlaid imagery, small squares–implied pixels–border these intersections between objects, joining the in-focus with the transient. Gibson’s hazy landscape recalls a childhood street on a hot day, interrupted by the noise and presentation of memory in a rearview.

Among others, these works recall an ever-changing sense of space that calls back to an ephemeral sense of home. Whether the artists seek to create that home for themselves, critique that which is present around them, or engage with the building blocks behind their perspective; each creator posits their view with grace and technique while remaining willing to grow throughout this formative experience.