The Orbis

Issue date: 4/19/07 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Clay Carroll Carroll in front of his winning exhibit

Despite establishing a studio art major only two years ago at the insistence of some highly devoted students, Vanderbilt has given out one of the largest undergraduate art awards in the country since 1984: the Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award. The winner receives $25,000 to use the year after graduation for traveling and living while doing art, so the stakes are high. After the year is up, the winner comes back to Vanderbilt and presents a show of the past year's work in the Fine Arts Gallery. The second prize of $10,000 comes without the stipulation of having a show at Vanderbilt in the coming year. Senior art majors slaved away during their second semester on everything from paintings to video installations to sculpture in order to prepare exhibitions to be judged by three visiting jurors.

Eight seniors competed for this year's Hamblet Award with a diverse array of artwork displayed across three rooms in the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center. The opening reception, held March 30, drew a crowd of over 100 students, faculty and community members. Clay Carroll won the highly-coveted prize with his beautifully executed yet haunting installation piece entitled "GOLDEN CHILDREN: A Retrospective of Jacques Menotti's 1984 Performance Piece 'Lifeworks,'" which documents his fictional search for his biological mother. Carroll created a believable scenario (described on a computed screen embedded in the first portion of the installation) complete with a portrait of his father, the fictional artist Jacques Menotti, pencil portraits (each incorporating Carroll's own facial features) of various women who could be his biological mother and a series of ultrasounds. Each aspect of the installation added to the stark visual appeal and presented viewers with the challenge of separating fact from fiction.

Carroll came to Vanderbilt as an engineering student, but says that "once studio art became a major, the decision was quite simple, and I haven't been to an engineering class since." He began working on the concept for the installation last summer, but did not begin building the actual structural elements for the installation until February. Though he has explored a wide range of media during his time at Vanderbilt, he has spent the most time with painting, sculpture, photography and installation, with installation being his primary focus for the last year and a half. His current plan is to complete a body of work for next year's solo show at Vanderbilt, and also to attend Harvard University's master program in architecture at their Graduate School of Design. Regarding the art program at Vanderbilt, Carroll is appreciative of both the state-of-the-art facilities and the excellent faculty. "With the new building and the new major, Vanderbilt's art program has become more visible on campus, and the students have larger and cleaner spaces to create work in -- a luxury that has allowed me to take the direction that I have with my recent human scaled installations...It's the faculty that has always made the program so strong regardless of the space that has been available for students to work in."

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