To finish out the school year, Linfield Art Gallery is hosting an exhibition that includes art from five graduating seniors. The gallery is part of the senior capstone for Daniel Olson, Annemarie Mullet, Adrian Lee, Allison Hmura and Andrew Goodwin. The pieces vary from interactive pieces to crochet to photography. The exhibition also includes a hanging installation that allows light to filter through from the skylights.
Throughout the process each of the artists had to pick artists that inspire them, as well as reflect on their processes and artistic intention.
During the artist talks, Adrian Lee discussed her desire to capture childlike wonder and nostalgia in her large diorama, “Totsville,” which includes five cubes or rooms, filled with upcycled material that create cute scenes. Overtop there is white cloud that adds to the dream like nature, and pulls from one of her influences, “Care Bears.”
The piece includes a brightly colored painted statement on the wall that conveys Lee’s hopes for the art, “it could help to … heal the inner child.”
Andrew Goodwin presented an interactive piece that functions as a social critique against the privileged, specifically cis white men. The piece includes two paths that you take based on specific qualifications relating to privilege. The interior path is meant to force privileged people to squeeze within the confines of the piece in order to convey the experience of those less privileged and to educate on topics relating to privilege.
Within the gallery, Allison Hmura has four separate presentations, each relating back to the experience of pain in daily life and the act of balancing work and personal aspects of life.
Her piece “Intimate Landscapes” is a photography piece that depicts her sleeping in white sheets amid nature. For these photos she drew influence from Ana Mendieta’s “Earth Body” works, and felt it conveyed peace in a personal ecosystem.
Hmura’s exhibition also included two painted works, “Processing Anger” and “Bed Sheets.” The former is what its title suggests, Hmura finds art to be a great way to process her emotions and frustration in life but more specifically her experience of chronic pain and misdiagnosis throughout her life. The latter piece is painted the colors that Hmura dreams in, and meant as a protest against the imbalance of working life, and an expression of the pain she experiences even while sleeping.
Her final piece is a large installation titled, “Parts of a Whole” which was funded by Lorrie Fredette, who was an inspiration for Hmura during the process. The piece includes numerous pods made of twisted wire and old ceramic wrappers.
Daniel Olson presents a short rotoscoped piece of a scene from “Monty Python,” rotoscoping is an animation process that involves drawing atop live action film in order to create an animated scene. The overall piece had four written segments that worked in tandem with the animation. Olson questions whether violence in media, such as films, makes people violent, concluding that they in fact do not. This point is emphasized by painting the question and answer on the wall alongside the piece.
Annemarie Mullet included three crochet pieces for her portion of the gallery. Two of the pieces were outfits made entirely by hand, which includes a replication of an outfit worn by Mabel from “Gravity Falls.” The third piece is a free form tapestry of Mullet’s dog, a piece that took upwards of 100 hours to complete.
Mullet discusses the calming nature of crochet and her process of creating a piece such as the dog. She showed the original picture, and the way she combined her digital art skills to create the color blocking within the piece.
When beginning the actual crochet, Mullet started with the eyes in order to get the scale right, and was able to work outwards from there.
The “Ripples” Gallery will be open from now until May 25, be sure to go check out the works of these Linfield Seniors.