The Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition 1 opened on Wednesday, March 28, and closes today at 5 p.m. BFA1, the first of two BFA shows, exhibits the work of Paul Birza, David Tysman and Justin VanGenderen, artists whose work involve drastically different mediums.

As Birza explains in his artist statement, his use of the still life and photographic landscape genre “comment[s] on aspects of contemporary culture” in an ordinary yet enlightening fashion. The 12 c-type photographs in his “Suburban Landscape Series” convey the humdrum drone of suburbia, while capturing it in a frozen moment of silent commerce, loneliness and desolation. The photographs of empty parking lots, streetlights and “for sale” signs point to something that the entire human experience involves, in urban and suburban areas alike: solitude. The feeling one gets from these photographs is a mixture of depression, insight, peace and even contentment. Indeed, the “Suburban Landscape Series” captures suburbia in all of its monotony and security.

Birza’s other works also involve a dose of everyday life. His four still-life paintings, depicting pineapples, peaches, pears and oranges, are examples of the classic oil-on-canvas fruit still-life. The light and dark blues of the backgrounds complement the oranges and yellows of the fruit. Birza’s basic subject matter—in both his photographs and his paintings—show bits of life we probably miss everyday. In his work, Birza shows us canned fruit and suburban landscapes and hopes to “depict them in an ironic and… aesthetically interesting manner.”

The second artist in the exhibit, David Tysman, makes use of stoneware and plaster. Two of Tysman’s communion sets are on display, both on loan from their respective Christian Reformed churches. In addition to his ceramic pieces, Tysman has five life-like plaster figures on display. The titles of these figures are “Mother,” “Sister,” “Cousin,” “Friend” and “Wife.” It seems evident that Tysman is exploring the woman’s place in life and the various roles she is born into and acquires. As Tysman put it in his artist statement, “the products of art making are often the evidence of the struggle to figure something out.” In this series of plaster figures, Tysman asks the question “What is feminism?” Although this question is impossible to answer through art, Tysman offers interesting insight to the notion of feminism. His figures seem to be extensions of whatever is below them: the ground, their titles as women, their assigned place in society. The figures seems to be moving upwards—to be emerging out of something—and at the same time, they seem to be struggling against some sort of oppression. The idea Tysman conveys is the struggle to ascend, which seems to capture the entire feminist movement, and, more simply, the fight for equal rights.

The final artist exhibiting his work is Justin VanGenderen. As his artist statement explains, VanGenderen is “fascinated with the way…new technology is affecting the lives of everyone in the world physically and psychologically.” His fascination with our era of hypertechnology is evident in his series of photographs on cloning, his digitally remastered photographs, and his three computer installations.

VanGenderen explores the issues involved with using new technology—naturally—with the new technological mechanism of digital photography and through the use of three iMacs. The five photographs in his “Cloning Series” present the same person or people represented numerous times in the same picture. VanGenderen’s pictures are so realistic-looking that the inception of human cloning seems at hand. His photographs blur the line between reality and fiction and between actual truth and pop culture-imposed truths. The photographs in his digitally-remastered series show how technology can gloss over reality to create the perfect body or the perfect house or the perfect marriage.

Finally, his computer installations point to a loss of identity due to the advances in technology. The three works are titled “Age?” “Sex?” and “Location?” suggesting that technology carries us so far away from ourselves that we actually forget these things, or at least that technology can manipulate all three of these things. Overall, VanGenderen’s work seems to inquire how much of the self is lost to technology.

All three artists pose poignant questions about the state of the world around us, whether these questions involve the changing face of suburbia, the changing face of women or the changing face of technology. The show should be seen for the quality of the work, but also to prove the merit of these questions.

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