Montejano’s “Light as of Thought”

Joe Duffy / Asst. A&C Editor / The USD Vista

They’re inside our homes. They’re all over our cars. We walk past them every day. Chances are, you’re sitting near one right now. What are they? Windows, of course.  

On Thursday, April 4, students and members of the visual arts faculty gathered in the Camino art gallery to hear USD senior Nina Montejano defend her thesis project, an exhibition entitled “Light as of Thought.”

In a neat, single-file row spanning the walls of the gallery hung 36 graphite drawings of windows. Each drawing was different from the next—darker, more somber depictions often contrasted with their brighter neighbors. Some of the drawings could easily be recognized as windows, while others were disorienting at first glance, appearing as geometric abstractions of black and white shapes.  

Montejano, a visual arts and architecture double major, is no stranger to public showcases of her artwork. This past fall, she displayed a project called “Made You Look” in the same gallery as her current exhibition. Those drawings—three large scale graphite compositions that played with space and perspective, flipping ordinary scenes upside down—were completed over the summer and funded by the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) Grant, which provided her with $5,000 to focus on her artwork in lieu of a summer job or internship.

“The window was something that grew out of my past work, where I was focusing on domestic interiors with figures, and then manipulating those scenes in order to work with the ideas that I was working on for this project,” Montejano said. “But after doing that project, I was kind of overwhelmed with how many things I was working on…so I started focusing on one aspect of the architecture of the domestic space, which was the window.”

Montejano said that the drawings included in her current exhibition fall into three categories. The first type consists of light coming through windows and falling over objects or the shared edge of a wall or floor. The second type flips negative and positive space in the composition and turns the window into a dark shape emerging out of a white background. The third and final type of drawing purposely emphasizes geometric patterns and traditional artistic elements like line, shape, and texture, nearly abandoning the literal representation of a window altogether.

The result is a project that differs greatly from the drawings in “Made You Look”—in terms of sheer size and content—but retains many of the same familiar qualities, and finds the beauty contained in quiet, domestic spaces.

USD junior Xavier Brenza, who works in the Writing Center with Montejano, attended the artist’s talk on Thursday and was impressed by the drawings. 

“The quality and the quantity of the works speaks for itself,” Brenza said.

Discussing the artists that influenced her project, Montejano cited the work of Vija Celmins and Uta Barth as being two of the primary inspirations for her drawings. Celmins is a Latvian-American visual artist known for her photo-realistic representations of natural wonders and environments, such as the ocean, night sky, and spider webs. Barth, on the other hand, is a German photographer whose out-of-focus photos and abstract depictions of sunlight seek to deconstruct conventions of visual representation and draw connections between photographic and human perception.

“I feel like their work focuses on the exchange between the perceiver and the perceived, and it doesn’t just focus on what they’re showing, but it’s how they’re showing it,” Montejano said.  

In her talk, Montejano also made clear the theological, philosophical, and literary motivations for her project. She cites “Art & Theological Imagination,” a course taken at USD and taught by Susie Paulik Babka, Ph.D., as being a major influence on both this exhibition and her previous one in the fall. That class, said Montejano, was one of the first times in her life where she was encouraged to embrace her uncertainty about God. She found a strange comfort in accepting that she simply couldn’t know the answers to certain spiritual questions.

Other influences she discussed included the philosopher Immanuel Kant and his ideas concerning the existence of two realities—an objective and a subjective—as well as the work of William Carlos Williams, whose poem “These” inspired the title of her latest exhibit.

On Friday, April 5, the day after her thesis defense, a reception was held in the Camino art gallery for the final day of her exhibition. Many students, staff, and members of Montejano’s own family attended the reception. More than one visual arts student remarked that the event had an unusually large turn-out.

USD junior Nick Cohn was one of the students in attendance that evening, and had much to say about the artwork hanging on the walls. 

“I’m incredibly impressed by the way in which the artist blends abstract forms with very rigid geometry through a binary of light and shadow,” Cohn said. “When I look at (the drawings) I can see the artist’s intention playing with my own imagination.”

Montejano described this project as a step toward abstraction, a representational space that she’s beginning to feel more comfortable with.

“I think I’ll stick with (abstraction) because what I like about what I did is that it was still somewhat familiar and I’ve been doing that since I got to school here,” Montejano said. “I enjoyed moving toward the abstract because that was the way I disrupted the familiar that I was portraying for this project.”

The experimentation and hard work on her part seems like it’s paying off, as more and more people take notice of her artwork. “Light as of Thought” was an exciting exhibition in and of itself, but its subject matter runs parallel to Montejano’s own artistic journey—one that’s bright, promising, and out in the open, for all to see.