Daily life in this present time can be a rich emulsion of pointed commentary, digital tools and escapes, frankly, everything seems to be hyper. The artwork currently on exhibition in the University of Wyoming Visual Arts Building Gallery, April 2 through May 11, is the culmination and exceptional work of graduating Bachelor of Fine Art (BFA) students, fueled by hyper-focused creative energy, hardened technical ability and depth of knowledge in art history. The works on display are responses to challenges that many face, as much as it is an individualized directive by each artist to observe and act.
“The last couple major exhibitions by students, this BFA show and the student juried exhibition in the museum, are a huge indicator of changes taking place in visual arts because student graphic and experimental pieces won major awards this year,” UW Assistant Professor of Graphic Design Brandon Gellis said. “It speaks volumes about where things are going in visual arts.”
The UW BFA exhibitors are Sierra Morrow, Alexine Sumner-Hultgren, Sarah Trostle, Jarron Springer, Cassidy Newkirk, Cole Carpenter, Ezra Hansen, Curtis Holcomb, Hailey Woodall, Peyton Fitzgerald and Katie Baker.
Each BFA degree candidate is required to apply for the degree through the UW Visual Arts Department and a portfolio review process follows. BFA students are also required to take more art history credits, as well as credits outside their area of focus.
The artwork on display speaks to the depths and wide array of knowledge and interconnectivity between wrote academic disciplines, science, math, economy, language and the aesthetic search for human emotion, that the students all possess.
“It stimulates artistic courage to see the work progressing and turning digital art into fine art,” Gellis said.
As one enters the UW Visual Arts Building Gallery, it may be an element of variety that is initially striking, but the show was set up so that the work of different artists, conveying different ideas, does so as a progression and a coherent conversation among works of art.
The south wall, nearest to the building’s main entrance, showcases UW’s growing volume of meaningful experimental digitized art. Flat screen monitors synergize aesthetic design and coding, to create a map and a story, while sensors detect observable input and respond to the viewers’ presence. Small flat screen devices are queued precisely to converse and echo one another. As the wall turns 90 degrees, the digitized collection continues with a chaotic visual array being funneled through another flat screen. As this digitized expressive art flows down the wall from left to right, it culminates in a way with a digitally fabricated, somewhat three-dimensional, constructed form that simply has to be seen.
“Both of my pieces of artwork have to do with ‘mental differences’, rather than mental disabilities, how anxiety and trauma effect us,” UW BFA Graduate Alexine Sumner-Hultgren said. “I’m using sensory devices and digital devices to experiment with themes and stuff that can be hard to talk about, like depression and anxiety, because the process I use grabs the viewer’s attention, makes them look at something difficult and confront it.”
Photographs of a rich pastoral, but equally intense and personal ranching lifestyle follow on the wall. The space between walls is activated by the multi-dimensional mixed media tapestry paintings flowing side by side, hung in suspension from the ceiling. On the opposite wall, the viewer can feel the value based drawing, the portrait’s life yearning to reach out from behind their simplified wig. Ceramics encased in clear displays show how something as basic and historic as earth is transformed through human hands to meet present and future ideas, to become earthenware with digitized design.
“The ability to use new tools in the department, like lasers, to create some of my printmaking blocks eventually led me to apply the same ideas to my ceramic work,” UW BFA Graduate Curtis Holcomb said. “I’m working with positive and negative space to play with optical illusion. For me, an optical illusion is as close as you can get to the awe-inspiring disbelief of real magic.”
Gold highlighted and experimental prints bring the viewer to an island wall close to the center of the gallery. The other side of the temporary wall exhibits a sculpted organic form created to appear light and weightless. Intaglio prints and knitted forms ask the viewer to come face to face with ideas of nature, ideals and femininity. The series of prints on the north wall softly fold color and light to create a landscape synonymous with the other natural feminine forms at this end of the exhibition.
The show gives viewers a chance to test what they might think of as fine art while allowing viewers to fall back on imaginative and creative departures from historical foundations. This is where the magic begins, the end of academia.
