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Saturday, April 22, 2006

Fine Arts show

so last night was the Fine Arts department's senior thesis show, and due to the high number of students this year and the fact that the illustration department is taking up all of the gallery space on campus, it was held in a warehouse fifteen minutes away. brian and i went, and i was surprised by the huge turnout. a whole lot of people i knew were there, so it was actually a nice show to socialize at. plus, open bar, and while i'm not a big drinker, i do enjoy a Beck's Dark from time to time.

i took some pictures with my cameraphone. they're not great quality and my phone's memory ran out quickly, but its still nice to have them

immediately one of the most noticable pieces was this bed made entirely out of corn husks and the accompanying flowers around it.

i only got about one third of the flowers in the picture, so yeah, it was definitely a BIG piece, and masterfully crafted.

my friend Jessica Rinck made these wild sculptural dresses that stood near the corn husk bed.

at first they were a bit shocking andgraphic, but as i began to look at them i was just completely intrigued by the shapes and materials. i really liked them and it was only a half hour later when i went to the bar and ran into Jessica that i found out they were hers, so i congratulated her and told her that i really dug them.

if i had to pick a "winner" of the show, i'd give it to my co-worker at the library, Reina Okawa, whos prints were gorgeous and has the distinction of being the only artist you had to go upstairs to see in her tiny little skybox area. the only decent picture i was able to get of her stuff was this one of two of the six conical lamps, but the picture doesn't show any of the amazing detail in the printed graphics on vellum.

I later found that one of the great prints i was unable to photograph was actually on her website, so here's that.

my first runner-up for "winner" would definitely be Michelle Payne, who had a series of bound and warped wooden sculptures on tiny pedestals filling up a good chunk of the floor in the first room. I liked them so much, I took three pictures:





there were a few small scupltures in the first room that confused me. i almost tripped over a few of them because of their erratic placement on the floor and how small they were. mostly sheets of steel that had been blasted with the lazer cutter.



noteworthy ones without pictures:
this one guy (i took his card but then took it back) had three giant boards of wood on the wall in the second room. from afar i thought they were canvases and that he painted the wood grain so fantastically that it looked real, but then when i got right up to it to look, it was actually big boards of wood that had been burned and stained. still cool, but less impressive. a LOT of people agreed with me on that.

Radha had her own tiny room across from the stairs to Reina's skybox and her drawings were really fascinating. I have no idea what any of them were, and all of the titles were in a language i'm unfamiliar with, but they looked like a mix between floating sky islands and potatos with vines growing out of them and were really quite nice.

Tom has one large painting of somebody throwing a molotov cocktail at an ATM machine in a world of dripping splattered pinks and oranges. it certainly posed questions (for one, who throws molotov cocktails underhand at a target six feet away? who stand six feet from the thing they're throwing a molotov cocktail at?)

Maarten had a series of nice prints, but i wasn't too impressed as they mostly involved the same block print of a quarter-moon. still, they were nice.

Hope's paintings were really quite interesting and she had easily my favorite titles for her pieces (one was "I lost count somewhere around 7200").

Katrin's painting/mosaics were great and a lot of people seemed to really like the one that was actuall a wooden cube suspended in space that we could all walk around and peer through the carved holes. Those were Brian's favorite of the night.

I don't remember her name, but whoever did the performance piece "Anticipation"...I can say that the name was certainly adequate. We waited around to see what she was going to do, and then when the time came, she stood on a small white soapbox, held a microphone too close to hear mouth, and read a speech off a piece of bleached copy paper about people needing to make sounds that are considered. It was clearly a case of not going far enough, as the speech was bland and meaningless, going against the advice it was disspelling, and as her senior thesis she could have at least memorized it or had cards prepared rather than reading it off of a sheet of paper in her hand. The most satisfying part of the performance was, in fact, the anticipation the hour before it actually started, though I think that would have been amplified and the title made more relevant if rather than a speech sounding like it were written by a seventh grade writing fair, she had a series of flash cards prepared and got up to the microphone, looked at her cards, shuffled them around as if they were out of order, quietly said "umm...huh..." and shuffled the cards around again looking worried. Do that for thirty seconds, then stop, bow and walk away. That's the performance. That would have caused a great deal more anticipation and been more satisfying, I think.

11:43 AM
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