LEWISTON — The Bates College Museum of Art has announced its spring exhibitions, featuring the annual show of work by graduating studio art majors, a display of recent museum acquisitions and a show of drawings by renowned Maine artist Dozier Bell.

The Senior Thesis Exhibition 2013 will open with a reception at 6 p.m. Friday, April 5, and runs through May 25.

“Dozier Bell: Mind’s Eye” and “Selections from the Permanent Collection: Recent Acquisitions” will open on April 6 with a reception at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 11, and also continue through May 25.

The museum is located in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. Exhibitions and related programming are open to the public at no cost. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and until 7 p.m. Wednesdays while the college is in session. For more information, call 207-786-6158 or visit bates.edu/museum.

Dozier Bell: Mind’s Eye

“Mind’s Eye” focuses on a selection of Bell’s small yet powerful recent works. These graphite drawings depict mysterious cloud-covered mountains, fog-shrouded craggy fingers of land jutting into the ocean and fragmented skylines in the low light of dawn or dusk. The work embodies the force of nature rather than focusing primarily on descriptive details.

Bell was born in Lewiston. She exhibits extensively throughout the U.S., including frequent solo shows in New York. Her work is found in numerous collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the museums at Bates, Bowdoin and Colby colleges. She is represented by Aucocisco Gallery in Portland and Danese Gallery in New York City.

Senior Thesis Exhibition 2013

Exhibiting drawing, photography and sculpture, four studio art majors at Bates are showing their year-long thesis projects in the Senior Thesis Exhibition. This year’s artists explore conceptual and psychological topics including the effects captured by a camera obscura; the relationships between spaces private and public, uninhabited and inhabited; representational portraits; and sculptural abstraction.

This year’s artists are Eleanor Anaclerio of Winnetka, Ill.; Erin Augulewicz of Eliot; Amanda Wescott of North Andover, Mass.; and Isaac Thompson of Yorba Linda, Calif.

Anaclerio employed Bates dorm rooms as camera obscuras, blacking out the windows except for a pinhole-sized opening that projected upside-down but clear images of the outdoors into the room. She captured these projected images with a digital camera. Inspired by an interest in overlooked spaces, Anaclerio uses the camera obscura to create dreamlike images that explore complex relationships between private and public spaces.

Augulewicz’s drawing project focuses on exaggerated features of the human body, specifically the face. Experimenting with various drawing media such as permanent markers and oil sticks, she evokes highly emotional qualities in her drawings of the human face. One of Augulewicz’s goals is for the viewer to identify with her drawings and project their own feelings onto them.

Interested in human interactions and inspired by street photography, Wescott created a series of photographs that reveal interesting contrasts between inhabited and uninhabited spaces in shopping malls. In addition to making formal explorations of architecture, the images invite commentary on how social and economic conditions affect built environments. Wescott describes the deserted malls as “time capsules” and uses formal elements to communicate the “creeped-out feeling” she gets navigating these spaces.

Thompson has made a site-specific sculptural installation for the Bates museum. He welds steel rods into transparent cubes that function simultaneously as sculptural volumes and drawings in space, and that are installed in a modular progression across walls. By distorting the cubes, playing with perspective and draping some cubes with plastic to obscure some of that drawing, Thompson hopes to make viewers aware of their own perception as they move around the piece.

The year-long senior thesis process was overseen during the fall semester by Senior Lecturer Emeritus of Art and Visual Culture Paul Heroux and during the winter semester by Senior Lecturer in Art Robert Feintuch, who also curated the exhibit and oversaw its installation.

Selections From the Permanent Collection: Recent Acquisitions

“Selections From the Permanent Collection: Recent Acquisitions” exhibits works by both historical and contemporary artists, representing a wide variety of media and subject matter. Several of the works are by artists with Maine connections, including Marsden Hartley, William Manning, Charlie Hewitt and Andrew Wyeth. Others represented include Odilon Redon, Enrique Chagoya and Beth Van Hoesen.

Helping to create the exhibition were two curatorial interns, senior art and visual culture majors Cara Garcia-Bou of Westchester, N.Y., and Nell Wachsberger of New York City. They worked under the guidance of museum curator William Low to research, select and prepare works from the museum’s collections.

“My internship has been an incredible hands-on learning experience,” said Garcia-Bou. “The experience has helped me think concretely about a future in the arts.”

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