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Art
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Walt Whitman upon the publication of his epic poem, Leaves of Grass: “I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career...” These sentiments mirror what we wish for, what we hope for on behalf of our graduating seniors. Emerson’s comments articulate the ideal that we hold for our students and, indeed, for many of us engaged in the expressive arts.
The BFA exhibition is a culmination of an intensive curriculum that combines studio practice, contemporary theory, and liberal arts. The program emphasizes personal discovery and visual/conceptual exploration through a multi–disciplinary approach that, depending on individual direction, employs and often combines the mediums of painting, photography, print arts, sculpture and video/media arts. This exhibition is conceived and produced — aided by peer critiques and faculty guidance — as a self–directed thesis during their senior year. I celebrate with you the accomplishments of these artists who stand on the threshold of their professional lives. They were a joy to work with and we invite your engagement in viewing their skillful, deeply personal work.
David Ulrich
Chair, Art Department
Morgen Bell
Printmaking
My work may be roughly divided into the following categories: (a) those that are little and fiddly, (b) those that are chaotic, (c) experiments, (d) those that require excessive explanation, (e) inside jokes, (f) those with an obvious message, (g) derivative works, (h) systems of growth, (i) interesting mistakes, (j) artifacts, (k) mechanical contrivances, (l) others, (m) those abandoned before completion, (n) those that look nothing like they did when I imagined them.
Brittany Both
Printmaking & Painting
Behind happiness there is pain.
Behind life there is existence.
Behind every hue there is an experience, a lesson learned, a step closer to the bigger picture.
Another barrier broken down…
I paint to express the beauty.
Pain.
Purity.
Tainted.
Tangible and untouchable.
Creation equivocates to existence
and happiness.
Crystal Brust
Painting & Printmaking
My work explores the archetypes found in fairy tales and brings out the tragic nature of the stories meant as warnings or life lessons that have since been dulled down and sugarcoated to protect children.
Emily Bryan
Painting & Photography
My work subtly highlights American life with an undertone of loss and hopelessness, subsequently investigating the relationship of connectedness between people.
Aleah Chapin
Painting & Video
For thousands of years we have strived to portray ourselves, attempting, through multitudes of visual languages, to represent flesh and soul. My work continues this investigation of portraiture through the collision of paint, performance and pixels. By isolating the figure and transforming its physical environment, I hope to induce a more emotional response from the viewer. My intention is to simultaneously express representational and non-pictorial; simple and complex; beautiful and disturbing. By layering the new, old and timeless, I am exploring the need for recognition of identity.
Dana Clifton
Photography & Painting
I now find myself caught between two worlds. One, the ordinary, everyday into which, like most, I arrive on auto-pilot. The other, extraordinary, singular, ever- changing, I arrive in a state of wonder like a young child, with a child’s eyes, everything seen new – the everyday world around me suddenly transformed. I take a breath, blink my eyes, cock my head and suddenly the play of light and shadow is right in front of me, changing the space around me. In those subtle moments that pass by most of us unnoticed, I take a journey to a new place. I revisit old and familiar environments seen (but not seen) on a daily basis and am transported.
Brit Bele Exworthy
Video & Photography
As an artist, I am interested in identity and how identity is defined — not necessarily by ourselves but by those around us. I am also interested in how gender defines us in both positive and negative ways. I am curious about how our actions and reactions are perceived by others and question how much of the information we expose about ourselves is affected by how we think others will perceive it. My video works about women is intended for a general audience of men. My intention is to challenge gender-specific strengths and weaknesses as well as the idea of the persona.
Ryan Feddersen
Painting, Printmaking & Sculpture
A sense of exploration and experimentation are the driving forces behind my work. My love of discovery and problem solving push me to explore a vast array of media from traditional to innovative. Every project is a new investigation, its aesthetic, material, and scale completely dependent on the content, humor and social critique as constant components in my work. By using a tongue-in-cheek approach to traditionally difficult subject matter, a dialogue is opened to the viewer that invites more in depth discussion into topics that might otherwise be avoided.
Kelsey Fein
Printmaking & Photography
Static vibrations of inanimate creatures, void of life.
Moving too fast to see small things
(small things moving too fast to be seen),
seemingly insignificant.
An imagined memory of a past I never knew
and was never a part of.
A life suddenly ceasing, silent, still, beautiful.
Close up abstractions,
dream-like and obscure.
Matt Holmes
Film, Video & Music
As Fellini put it, “Cinema uses the language of dreams.” Much like our dreams, film is a language of images. It is through the medium of film that we can completely alter our view of the experience of life. Time and space are allowed to loosen from the confines of reality and be re–organized in a way that is entirely new — a reflection of the mind’s tendency to alter the echoes of our perception.
Through film, video, and installation work, my desire is to recreate the certain intangible emotional and mental images that we form in our minds as way of perceiving the physical world around us.
Andrea Hoyer
Sculpture & Painting
406.579.2164
With my art I try to infuse the old and the new, new techniques with an old aura, traditional materials with untraditional treatments. Choosing materials and themes that are timeless helps to create a body of work that does not lose its meaning or value from one decade to the next. An example of this in my work includes conventional ceramic sculptures glazed in an unconventional wax and metal powder mix; in combination with clean lines and forms the sculptures shift seamlessly between the classic and the contemporary.
I want the viewer to feel a sense of nostalgia when experiencing my art.
Zoe Kaylor aka Betty X
Video & Painting
RELIGIOUS REICH – BETTY X
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” — Sinclair Lewis
My album and video installations with the same title, Religious Reich, mock the unholy alliance of state and church — the horror of religion and politics with power unchecked.
My recent mixed media and video installation work presents historical images of dictators and cult leaders throughout history in an Orwellian totalitarian protocol in juxtaposition with abstract painting color fields. It addresses the issue of censorship, banned art throughout recent history, and presents a bleak dystopic near future where civil liberties have been abolished and viewing or making art is now a crime.
Miyako Kotera
Printmaking
When I’m making my work, I became a paper cutter from the 17th Century. Japanese paper cutting was born then, in the Edo period (1603–1869). I follow the cultural traditions of paper cutting, a path that is both narrow and wide. I honor the ways of my artist ancestors, but I can be myself and very different. I can create worlds in motion, like blooming flowers, and swimming fish, and snowflakes. With each cut, I try to show my love and respect for Japanese culture and traditions, but with each cut I am making something new, something uniquely mine. I am from the 17th Century. I will pass paper cutting on to the 21st Century, just as my elders have done for me.
Justin R. Lytle
Sculpture
I find there to be a quiet and palpable knowledge of our past selves that resides in our throwaways. Little histories find their way into everyday items that once were held, used, and ultimately lost by us. What stories do our forgotten remnants have to tell? What can we learn from them?
My work strives to both reveal and fabricate history through the manipulation of the ephemera that holds it. I look to heighten the ‘give and take’ connection between the observer and the observed, by drawing on the ether of time and memory that surround them. As we forge our way into the ever-increasing acceleration that is the present, I hope to uncover the still and reflective moments that lie in our wake.
Nicholas Marshall
Video
360.970.5852
The idea of organizing taken and found footage in order to create a product enjoyable to a viewer of any audience motivates me.
My process and my goals are to create beauty from unsightly, pleasant from unpleasant and images from poems.
Nostalgic revelations and ghosts of the past inspire me to exert myself more.
Patrick Miller
Printmaking & Photography
I’ve constructed a body of work that explores the reality of our past versus the memories time has created. The subject matter sets up a conflict between youth, beauty, innocence, love, and the inevitability of decay.
Kelsey Lee Offield
Sculpture, Photography & Painting
As my art develops I have found that my subject matter tends to revolve around dichotomies. Perhaps it is because I am a fraternal twin. I am the girl. He is the boy. We have always been glaringly different. I am inspired by the practical details of everyday life. Through the mediums of sculpture and photography I turn objects that intrigue me into precarious moments. My work asks the viewer to question the character of objects and images we often overlook.
Eamonn Martin Parke
Painting & Photography
Wanderlust
I took an interest in Photography because I was afraid I might forget. That is just as true today as it were then.
Spencer Philp
Painting
Comic books. Joe Average sees them as the magazine version of Saturday morning cartoons, men in tights fighting robots and space aliens and, let’s be honest, life just wouldn’t be complete without knowing that someone somewhere is crafting the life and times of Captain Superguy and his fight to free Frogland from the evil Burzonians. But that’s not the only story that’s ever been told with boxes and bubbles full of text.
Quite recently with the release of classics like Art Spiegelman’s Maus or Alan Moore’s The Watchmen people have begun to realize that the humble comic book is just as capable of conveying the emotions of human experiences and drama as a good book or a fine painting.
Comics are works of art.
Michael Rioux
Printmaking & Video
I am involved in the process of creating forms that are symbolic of human feeling; not emotion but everything that can be experienced, the awareness of the process of life. Working with form is my devotional practice. It is how I find meaning in, or give meaning to, life. It is an intuitive process. It requires responsiveness. It requires listening. I listen to the material I am working with. If I am open and responsive to the material, the art tells me what it needs. The material can be anything that exists. There is no ingredient in art that may not also be found outside of it. Artistic objects are not intrinsically precious, but derive their value from their formal use.
John Ruszel
Sculpture & Printmaking
The objects with which we routinely interact are not created as works of art. Power lines, riddled with connectors and insulators; airplane wings designed to hold back massive forces; machines more complex than one may comprehend. We use these objects, we trust them, and we routinely overlook them. But in their utility lies great beauty — and this is where my artistic process begins.
From these objects, formal and aesthetic elements are distilled. Elements are arranged and tested in new materials. Materials are used to guide form.
The work is not a reinterpretation of the existing form but an expression of its essence.
Brian Seldt
Printmaking & Sculpture
www.brianseldt.com
brianseldt@yahoo.com
There is perhaps nothing more frightening to a human than the knowledge that one day they will die. Yet, armed with this knowledge, many humans walk through life already dead, content to waste their life on fruitless pursuits.
Death is a great mystery; you can experience it only once, religions are based on it, and it is promised to every one. A large part of my work focuses on my fascination with the life–death struggle. Through my explorations I seek to not only enlighten myself about the mechanism of death, but to also send a wake up call to the viewer: “Do something with your life!”
Memento mori.
Michael Williamson
Painting & Video
Introvert/extrovert mutt, compelled equally and by turns to layer paint, speech, and gesture.
Collect. Portray. Document. Emote. Remember.
Beneath the glowing color of canvases and the humorous theatricality of video is a loving, feisty urgency. Despite all attempts to hasten, revise, and eradicate history, be it of one heart or many, its embedded, precious lessons, emotions, and motivations await. I celebrate attachments to people, objects, events, scripts. My work invites viewers to pause, breathe, chuckle: to access the odd, intrinsic beauty, the costless, priceless value, of the ordinary.
Practice makes…better.