By Josh Hughes
The other week we featured the first half of the BFA Students, this week spotlight’s the other 6
Every year the twelve Bachelor of Fine Arts students get a few opportunities to showcase their work at the galleries around campus, culminating in a show at the Western Gallery. But before they can get to that point, the artists get a first chance to display their work that will continue and develop throughout the year. Often centered around themes of emergence, growth, development, this year’s aptly named Germination follows suit. While the exhibition has now ended, the show let gave the audience an introduction into each of the twelve artists’ distinct work and styles, which are sure to expand as the year goes on. In case you missed the exhibit, however, here’s a rundown of half of the students who make up the BFA, along with their work:
Cecilia Lister:
Through two canvasses, Lister’s painting in Germination depicts a self portrait of the artist and her clothes. Titled “Parts of Me are Still Plastic Bagging”, the figures exist in an ambiguous grey plane, both crouched and mirroring each other’s position. “I look into intimate personal moments of the everyday for inspiration,” said Lister about her work. “Here are the painting coveralls that I wear when I work and that have been in use in my family for multiple generations,” she continued.
Through detailed oil painting, she portrays a vivid portrait of the domestic, bringing to mind the youthful long for home and the complex importance of family. The two canvasses complement each other by combining to form the whole, but neither of the two self portraits feel complete. The work delicately exposes the feeling of being neither here nor there.
Natalie Millsap:
On a rectangular canvas, Millsap warps a wavy human body with the geometric glitch of cyberspace. Her piece, “Translation” deals with the digital trace that humans leave, and how that existence begins to bleed into the “real” world. “The question is how much our virtual world and real world combine or stay separate,” reads Millsap’s artist statement, addressing the blurring or “glitching” that occurs when our day-to-day interactions are affected by our digital interactions, and vice versa.
Mainly composed of dark purples and pinks, the body in “Translation” appears to be melting, but it remains distinguishable from the cubes that are engulfing it. In the bottom left corner one hand remains largely unaffected and intact, almost as though gripping a lost phone. Through quite an analog medium, Millsap touches heavily on digital implications of the 21st century and brings to question what even constitutes as the human body in current world.
Robyn Roberts
The only sculpture work in the Germination gallery, Roberts’ ceramic pieces “Penguin Hybrid” and “Abstract” explore the three dimensional space between light and shadow and presence and absence. “Abstract” especially plays with the formation of space through its perforated holes that poke throughout the piece. As with all sculpture, its dimensionality becomes enacted as the viewer walks around the artwork, but the holes of the piece create dynamic beams of light that manipulate the boundaries of sculpture.
“Penguin Hybrid”, on the other hand, toys with the concept of a human face by smacking it right on the head of a penguin. Roberts says her work often deal with people and the expression of human faces, something she intends to explore throughout the year working in the BFA. “I am excited to experiment further with sculpting detailed figures and expressions and to play with exaggeration and distortion of the figures,” she says of her work in the gallery. Both of her pieces also deal with human impact on the environment, circling back to her usage of ceramic as a naturally occurring material.
Clinton Sana
“The subject matter I focus on is based on the Chamorro experience in our society— does anyone notice?” reads the start of Sana’s artist statement for his work with the BFA cohort. Chamorro, the indigenous people of the Marianas Islands, are a culture politically divided by the United States and Guam. A combination of indigenous, Mexican, Filipino, Spanish and American, the Chamorro people represent a completely unique meshing of a vast array of cultures, something Sana explores in her rich charcoal work.
His pieces “Francisco On His Wedding Day” and “Rosalia On Her Wedding Day” are haunting portraits of a couple obscured by various grey collaging techniques. Based on “found photos, personal photos, and personal sketchbook drawings”, Sana’s work attempts to create a narrative of identity. Questioning his past and her present placement in respect to contrasting cultural values, his work simultaneously finds harmony in the form of the Chamorro experience in modern day America.
Marcus Waterman
“Aesthetics are our identities, and my work is about understanding the intrinsic associations that form our aesthetics,” reads Waterman’s artist statement on his piece for the exhibit, “41.2% Orange”. The biggest piece in the gallery, “41.2% Orange” confronts the viewer with a grand wall of color in the form of rectangular squares placed atop each other. Waterman’s work looks to explore the individual’s relationship with color, void of cultural or political implications. He suggests that our affinities for color, shape, and line define the way we experience spaces on a day to day basis, and in line with the 20th century color field painters, Waterman’s art evokes a visceral reaction based purely on formal elements.
“By over-saturating the viewer with both simple and distinguishable elements, I hope to incite a distinctive first impression; whether it be unease, disinterest, or excitement and joy,” says Waterman of the piece. The first in a series he intends to continue throughout the BFA, the work lets the viewer soak in and embrace physicality while leaving room for individual interpretation. In other words, self-identity guides Waterman’s work.
Mikah Washburn
Washburn’s piece in Germination, “Their Hands for Towers in the Dirt Plains Under Light”, combines several pencil drawings with charcoal sketches to create a culminating sense of rough anatomical diagrams. His piece shows various figures, some plunging into the abyss, some crawling sideways up a strange mechanism, all with geometric precision and the trace of her pencil outlines.
“Everything I have I owe to the ground,” reads Washburn’s own examination of the piece, which complements the work so much that it nearly feels like part of the piece. “I and them— my hands to touch the love and anger in the sun in its house, their hands for towers in the dirt on the plains under light. Come a wind, come mama, come home. I am buried in it all, the grip of the earth.” While his work might seem more impenetrable compared to other pieces in the gallery, there’s a sense of connectivity between all the elements in the work, suggesting a symbiosis of sorts between the self and the other.