Photo by Michael R.L. Kern
Somer Hahm poses at her Master of Fine Arts Thesis showing, in Fairbanks, Alaska; at The Annex Gallery.

First Friday galleria exhibitions opened with an astonishing array of imagination and playful horror this month. Well Street and Annex Galleries held dedicated showings of the master thesis works of three UAF students.

Chang Peng
Opening at Well Street, Chang Peng, a Master of Fine Arts candidate, delivered an intriguing showing of his computer-generated designs and the works that resulted from them. His creations are the result of more than a year of design and weeks of rendering. His very alien creations held a glimmer of familiarity in their expression. His goal in creating them was to establish human emotion in his creatures and their situations in order to convey a shared feeling with the viewer. With that stated, he accomplishes the goal of his thesis brilliantly with the striking expressiveness of his creatures, both in their portrait and animated forms. He hopes to continue on to a career in movie graphic animation.

Siyuan Wang
Also at Well Street, Master of Fine Arts candidate Siyuan Wang brought us a beautifully animated film with a sad, yet playful, story. Drawing crowds for several hours, as it was shown continuously, the audience was delighted by the subject matter of her nearly year-long work towards this showing. The computer animation used was colorful and exacting in locomotive detail.
Siyuan Wang is an immigrant from China, where she studied architecture, then came to UAF for her Master’s studies in digital animation. She hopes to continue to a career in computer animation.

Somer Hahm
At the Annex, this month’s First Friday turned up Somer Hahm, a Master of Fine Arts candidate at UAF. The paintings of her thesis evoked a range of initial thoughts and then, upon closer examination, another side of them was revealed. They are abstract and colored like an explosion at the Crayola factory, drawing and exciting the eye. Yet the child-like elements are soon forgotten as a darker side of the artist’s mind is shown in the works.
Piercing the veil of sunshine, we see an almost gallows humor in many of her works. They are absolutely gorgeous, candy-coated horror. Hahm’s thesis is the result of eight months of worthwhile production. She intends to continue, solo, in her future artistic pursuits, with no intent in becoming attached to a studio. She, also, has a slight inclination to becoming a college professor.