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CARLY KNASZAK
Assistant Reverb Editor
The annual senior art show will be on display until Dec. 11 at the Marion Art Gallery. The exhibit is called “A Work in Progress” and shows pieces from graduating seniors. Dec. 4 was when the exhibit first opened, and family and friends came out to the gallery to support the seniors. Walking into the gallery was like entering a different world about the struggle of everyday people. The artwork ranged from human emotions, history and how society is destroying the environment.
The display features seniors Laura Adinolfe, Brittany Campbell, Rebecca Chatterton, Nicholas Gates and Sarah Sperling. Many of the artists had deeper meanings behind their art that they wanted to share with the viewers.
Gates, who majors in BFA sculpture, used two elements in his piece “The Thing That Be.” He used metal and homemade paper. He wanted to take two materials that really do not go well together and create an intimate relationship between them.
“It is trying to talk about this relationship between plans and what actually happens. It reflects the awkward relationship between paper and steel, and in addition to that, three of my pieces kind of act to create a flow around it — a flow of human traffic around it,” Gates said.
He also used human models for two of his pieces. There are two performance pieces in the show, and it also hints back to that human condition.
“It references back to the content of the things you can’t help it. You kind of just have to walk past,” Gates said.
His inspiration behind his work was his mother’s diagnosis of Buerger’s disease, which is a clogging of the arteries in the limbs. It is a rare disease caused by smoking.
“It was kind of this realization that there are things in life that I’m not going to be able to control, especially here at college. There are things that I am just going have to face. I can’t get down about it because that is not going to help anything. So I am just going to have to deal with it as it is,” Gates said.
Adinolfe, a drawing and painting major, also did a piece that deals with a personal problem that most college students go through: anxiety. In her work “Confined,” the paintings feature a girl that looks like she is trapped in a box and does not know how to get out.
“I guess the inspiration behind it is wanting to get over the anxiety issues I have, and by creating a series, I was able to look deeper inside myself to find out how my anxiety works and affects my life,” Adinolfe said.
The series that Adinolfe has worked on took the whole semester to complete, just like the other artists featured in the gallery. “It is definitely exciting knowing that this is my last year, but I am going to miss it for sure,” Adinolfe said.
Rebecca Chatterton is a BFA in ceramics. For her piece “Evanesce,” she combined her ceramic sculptures with a number of mixed media.
She combined two hand-sculpted wolves with another wolf made out of steel, chicken wire, wax paper and covered in paraffin wax. Among the wolves, she arranged trash and semi-precious objects, and she projected a video she put together onto the sculptures, trash and wall.
“The trash and semi-precious objects were placed in this show to symbolize something that we have that is important to us, but only for a short amount of time. Most of the time, we end up eventually throwing it away and letting it disappear into the chaos of our daily lives, not even realizing its importance to us,” Chatterton said.
Chatterton is interested in how human interactions with nature can lead to a variety of outcomes for a species.
“Using clay, I have formed the wolf to appear submissive. It is low to the ground, tail tucked under to project a sense of fear and intimidation,” Chatterton said. “By combining my ceramic wolf with the projection and mixed [media], I am establishing a dialogue between the wolf of the present and the wolf of the future. The chaotic movement of people projected onto the wolves is representative of the potential human impact on a threatened or endangered species.”
Chatterton has been working on “Evanesce” since last Spring semester.
“It has taken some time to put together everything as a whole, and despite the length of time, in the end, it was such a rewarding experience to see it finally all together in the gallery,” Chatterton said.
Sperling is a visual arts and new media major and had a stunning display of digital paintings. She titled her project “Being.” The series showed brightly colored paintings of forests, jungles and different lands with an almost dull- looking monster peering at the nature around them.
“Every day, we will walk right by beauty without taking a moment to see any of it. We will go about our lives preoccupied with school, work, social media, so caught up in it and that we don’t stop,” Sperling said.
She also explained why she used monsters in her piece: “What if a monster took the time to enjoy nature’s wonders? What if that defines any creature as a monster?”
The design for each of the five creatures that she used in her series is based on ancient societies. The cultures chosen are Scandinavian, Chinese, Roman, Mayan and Egyptian.
She painted her series on a computer and she said, “It’s nice to see them full size instead [of] on a small computer screen.”
The Marion Art Gallery is located in Rockefeller Arts Center. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday, noon to 4 p.m; Friday and Saturday, noon to 6 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.; and it is closed on Mondays.